Spirituality and Dialectics:
Seeking Truth and Doing Justice
Thomas Merton, in what is undoubtedly one of his least frequently read poems, indicts his own generation as weak and suspicious, "loving emotion, hating prayer" and unworthy of wisdom (Merton 1963: 66). How strange these words sound coming from the great modern master of the spiritual life. What, after all, is the spiritual life about if not emotion? Surely it is not about the intellect. If we want to grow intellectually we read or engage in debate; if we want to grow spiritually we go on retreat or consult a spiritual director. Nor could it be about effective action on behalf of justice --otherwise we would hardly need all those seminars which attempt to relate spirituality and justice, which must, therefore, be about quite different things. Indeed, these divisions are reflected in the very organization of Catholic seminaries which makes a sharp distinction between academic and ecclesiastical jurisdictions and then subdivides the latter between officers responsible for pastoral and spiritual formation. There doesn't seem to be much left over for spirituality besides cultivating the right emotions. A similar division of labor prevails in most Catholic parishes which are large enough and complex enough to have a division of labor, with the single difference being that the intellectual formation of the laity is often neglected completely, with adult education programs dominated by the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA), which is nothing if not anti-intellectual in its approach.
This tendency to identify spirituality and emotion cannot help but be strengthened by the central place which the Christian tradition gives to loving and being loved, a point which lead the great Evangelical doctor Jonathan Edwards to assert, as if no argument were necessary, that religion is a matter of the affections, and that the question which divides Christians concerns rather just what sort of affections give evidence of God's work in our lives --and just how one determines whether or not such affections are present in oneself or others. And even if (against Edwards) we argue that love is not an emotion, but rather a way of acting, once philosophical and theological ethics have told us what love is, and the various disciplines which inform strategic thinking have told us how to love effectively, what is left over for "spirituality" seems to be the cultivation of the emotions which will dispose us to do what these other disciplines counsel.
Closely related to this tendency to identify spirituality with having the right emotions (and indeed flowing from it) is a tendency to focus inordinately on the problem of sin and to understand sin more as a deformation of the appetites (the passions and/or the will) than as a darkening of the intellect. Indeed, as we will see, if human development is affectively driven, then any failure to grow spiritually can only be a result of willful rebellion, and the only remedy for sin direct action by God on the will itself. While these conclusions are not always drawn out explicitly, this approach leads ultimately to Evangelicalism or crypto-Evangelicalism, with an explicit or implicit doctrine of radical depravity and an understanding of salvation centered on submission rather than on growth and development, even if the call for submission is couched in the more palatable language of "letting go and letting God."
In this paper I would like to suggest a radically different way of understanding the spiritual life, one which certainly does not disregard our affective or appetitive capacities, but which situates them in the context of an understanding of human nature which affirms --with Thomas and a millennium of Catholic tradition-- the leading role of the intellect and of action in human development. It is spirituality centered on excellence, on the full development of human capacities, understood as a real participation in the life of God. There is, to be sure, more to spirituality than simply the cultivation of our natural talents: thus the necessity of the dark nights, the noches oscuras which draw us beyond the merely human towards a level of development which is properly divine. But as we will see, these dark nights themselves are simply an inevitable result of developing to the point that we begin recognize our own finitude, and then begin to transcend that finitude under the attractive power of the Wisdom of God who, having first lured us with Her Beauty and Intelligibility and Goodness, (Wisdom 7:26-8:1) now speaks to us "in dark words, without romance" (Merton 1963: 66) of the tasks She would entrust to us.
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If we want to understand spirituality we must begin by understanding “materiality.” Matter, according to Aristotle, is the potential for receiving form (Aristotle. Physics, Metaphysics). To use more modern language, it is the possibility of organization. It is not inert “stuff;” indeed by itself it is not yet anything at all. At the same time, it is not something to be regarded negatively or as an obstacle to growth and development. The Latin materia, which translates the Greek hyle, comes from the root mater or mother. Matter is the latent potential for spirit. She is the mother of all things. Form or spirit is simply actual organization: a structure which is ordered to an end, and ultimately to the Good as such, which draws all things to itself (Aristotle. Physics, Metaphysics). Aristotle identified various degrees of organization or spirituality, each of which he said constituted a certain grade of soul or form characterized by definite capacities. Thus minerals were capable of retaining form, plants of nutrition, growth and reproduction, animals of sensation and locomotion, and rational souls of intellection and will (Aristotle. De Anima). All of these different degrees of organization constitute a real participation in Being as such, or God. The mineral participates by just being what it is, the plant by taking in nutrients to grow and reproduce, the animal by sensing finite goods such as food or potential mates and seeking them out. We humans participate in the life of God in a qualitatively higher way because being rational we can know God as such, and not merely in the finite goods He brings into being, and love God directly and not merely through the medium of His creatures.
Spirituality is not some special faculty distinct from the intellect and the will, nor is it something which happens in some faculty distinct from the intellect and the will. Indeed no one has ever actually made a coherent argument for such a faculty. Spirituality is nothing more or less than the development of our capacities, especially though by no means exclusively our distinctly human capacities. In this sense the term is convertible with virtue or excellence. Formulations which distinguish spiritual from intellectual and moral development are based on a vacuous psychology and set people on a dead end path, trying to cultivate something which simply doesn’t exist.
This said, what the Catholic tradition adds to Aristotle is a recognition that in addition to the virtue or excellence of which we are capable by nature, there is a supernatural excellence which we have by grace. This supernatural excellence, however, does not add some new spiritual faculty; rather it merely extends our intellectual and moral capacities in new and profound ways. Thus we can, by nature, know that God exists and identify some attributes which follow logically from the definition of God, but no finite mind can comprehend the divine essence (Aquinas. Summa Theologiae I.2). The revealed wisdom which we accept through faith and gradually come to understand discloses that essence to us. And since we become intentionally what we know, revealed wisdom allows us, in a very real sense, to become God. Similarly, we are capable by nature of loving God as the source of our being and of the universe which we enjoy. But this is still a limited and childish love. The incredible beauty of God which we come to know in revelation draws forth a more profound love, a love of God for God’s own sake, which the tradition has historically called caritas. Or to put the matter another way, by coming to love God for God’s own sake, we love God with God’s own love and thus come to share in God’s nature. This “connaturality” with God in turn yields its own distinctive sort of knowledge, the “caritative wisdom” which is a foretaste of the beatific vision (Aquinas. Summa Theologiae II.8, 9, 45; Garrigou-Lagrange 1938, Maritain 1937).
How does spiritual development take place? This is, of course, a complex question, and here we can offer only an outline. First, it must be understood that the appetites are ultimately dependent on cognition. We cannot desire or fear, love or hate something which we do not know (Aquinas. Summa Theologiae I.82). Spiritual development is thus ultimately driven by its intellectual dimension which always plays the role of leading factor. In order to understand spiritual development, we must, therefore, understand the nature of intellectual knowledge.
Now the human intellect is, by its very nature, dependent on the external senses, which supply raw data, and on the imagination and the other internal senses which form that data into coherent images which can then be remembered and transformed and become the object of estimative judgments. It is also dependent on the human nervous system, which allows us to relate images to each other in complex and interesting ways. Indeed, this possibility of relating images to each other is what Aristotle and his interpreters called the “potential intellect.” But the structure of the sense organs and the nervous system alone cannot account for all the evidence we have regarding the complex nature of intellectual knowledge. We must explain not only how at the physiological level images are related to each other to form ideas, but also why they are related in just precisely the way they are. In order to answer this question Aristotle developed the idea of the “agent intellect” which actually does the work of abstraction. The agent intellect always and already encodes or knows the forms of things and illuminates the images we garner from experience, abstracting their intelligible content (Aquinas. Summa Theologiae I.78, 79, 84-88). The question of course is just what this agent intellect is and where it resides. Some of Aristotle’s interpreters, such as Ibn Sina, Ibn Rusd, and Maimonides pointed out that in order to know immaterial essences, the agent intellect must itself be immaterial. But since matter is what individuates, that meant that there could be only one agent intellect for the whole human species. Others, such as Aquinas, objected, pointing out that this would make it difficult to explain how we have different ideas if we all have, in effect, a single mind. Neither solution was really satisfactory (von Steenberghen 1980).
It was Dante Alighieri who first charted a road forward on this question, arguing that the human potential intellect is actualized only over the course of history, through the development of human civilization (Alighieri. De Monarchia), a solution which avoided many of the problems of metaphysical monopsychism, while suggesting an answer to the question of just where our ideas come from. The development of the social sciences, and especially the sociology of religion and the sociology of knowledge, has made it possible for us to develop this insight into an authentic theory of knowledge. We know that people in different societies, especially societies with fundamentally different social structures, actually think differently. The way a society is structured provides a basis in experience for the development of certain concepts or, to put the matter more rigorously, creates a connaturality with those structures, which the people are actually living on a day to day basis. At the same time, individuals are located differently within a given structure and internalize it in unique ways. Human society is the agent intellect, and it is at once a collective reality which is prior to the individual, and something which is internalized in a unique way by each and every person.
The development of our appetites, in other words, is driven by the development of the intellect. We seek the highest good we know. But the development of the intellect is, fundamentally, the development of human society, something which is mediated to the individual through concrete historical action. Knowing and doing, theory and practice are ultimately one and the same. A just society is one which promotes the development of human capacities. It does this not only by centralizing and allocating resources for activities which cultivate our highest faculties but also because living in a society in which all things are ordered to the highest ends (while respecting the proper claims of lesser ends) provides a basis in experience for the notion of organization or ordering to an end and thus allows people to see meaning and purpose in the universe and ultimately to find God. A society which, on the other hand, does not promote the development of human capacities, either because warlords are able to divert surplus to warfare or luxury consumption or because resources are allocated by the market system, which has no access to information about which activities promote human development and which recognizes no global purpose, provides no basis in experience of the idea of organization and thus renders the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe opaque. The result is nihilism and despair.
We thus begin to see the intimate relationship --or rather relationships-- between spirituality and justice. Spiritual development is, fundamentally, a process of coming to know and love and contribute to the development of successively higher goods. On the moral side it is, therefore, fully convertible with growth in the virtue of justice which consists precisely in willing things in proportion to their goodness. And in so far as willing a good includes willing the conditions for that good, and contributing to the realization of a good entails struggling for the conditions under which that good can be realized, a person of spiritual depth is always a person who struggles for the creation of a society in which human capacities can be fully developed. At the same time, it is in the just act --in promoting the development of complex organization-- that we gain the connaturality with God which illuminates the images we garner from sensation and reveals their intelligible content making it possible to know the Good and seek it.
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Up to now we have considered the process of intellectual and moral development as if it were constrained and facilitated only as a result of the prevailing social structure and the specific social location and socialization of the individual in question. But what about sin? Don't we sometimes fail to make full use of the possibilities for development which are presented to us? Is it possible that we sometimes refuse development entirely?
Our starting point in answering these questions must be to affirm that in a certain sense we never turn wholly from the Good. If we did, we would cease to exist. Existence is, precisely, an ordering to God. Rather, we pursue the Good in ways that end up being dead ends --or even being destructive for us and for others. At certain times and places the conditions for human development are unfavorable. Resources are scarce. A road forward is possible only on the basis of violence --by taking what the other has produced, by making the other into merely a means of our own aggrandizement. There is good evidence that the first warlord states emerged when societies occupying relatively unfavorable ecological niches, in which production of a sufficient surplus to support the development of an advanced civilization was all but impossible, gained access to metal tools which allowed them to conquer their more developed neighbors and force them to pay tribute (Childe 1951, Lenski 1982). And what is done at the level of society as a whole is repeated at the individual level. Warlord states require violent warriors and submissive peasants. And families always socialize their children to survive in the world as it is. Thus children are denied the nurture they require --or rather forced to purchase it by learning warlike behavior or submission, or both. In either case the authentic vocation of the human being, which is to know and develop towards the Good, by adding to the degree of organization of the universe as a whole, is to a greater or lesser degree forgotten. Because the welfare, and even the existence of their society (as well as their place in that society) depend on warfare and exploitation, people begin to imagine that the universe itself is a place of radical violence (Lerner 1991) and, to a greater or lesser degree, lose sight of the Good which even now they seek, however corruptly.
In market societies the dynamic looks a bit different. Here it is not conquest but rather exchange which has become the dominant survival strategy. Individuals and societies prosper to the extent that they produce things other people want --especially people with money, who often, though by no means always, are the descendants of those who first acquired their resources through an act of violence. Those who are extremely rich simply attempt to conserve what they have so that they can avoid the necessity of labor; others seek to sell themselves so that they can become rich, or at least survive and prosper. It is not surprising that people begin to believe that there is no Good in itself, that value is simply a matter of personal preference, and that the universe itself is not ordered to a single telos, but rather to many competing ends.
The deformation of the individual which accompanies the emergence of tributary and capitalist societies and the exploitative and marketing character orientations which they encourage is, we should note, prior to any individual act of will. While the individual is not born deformed, s/he is socialized in a way which reproduces the deformation embedded in the social structure, so that every act of the intellect and the will is tainted by the corruption. In this sense, what we have outlined here, while avoiding any suggestion of radical depravity, is nonetheless an authentic doctrine of original sin.
We should note that in each of these cases the corruption of human nature which takes place has both an intellectual and moral component, but it is the intellectual dimension which is decisive, and which drives human deformation just as it drives human development. The partial picture which people have of the real conditions for development as a result of the particularities of their social location leads them to opt for violence or exchange directed at consumption rather than creativity and innovation. The structures which emerge as a result of these decisions in turn hold back development and create the impression that there is no real progress and thus no point to human life, to human history, or ultimately to the universe itself. This nihilism in turn breeds despair and feeds injustice. It is a darkened intellect, in other words, which deforms the will. This means that something besides direct action on the will --something which might break through the intellectual darkness and reveal the form of the Good-- might be able to restore the will to wholeness.
This analysis of sin leads to some interesting conclusions. First of all, it suggests that, contrary to the claims of most of the religious left, atheism is a serious problem. This does not mean that it is impossible for the theoretical atheist to be virtuous --provided the conditions exist for habituation to virtuous acts without knowledge of the End to which they are ultimately ordered. Even so, it must be stated clearly that atheism is always an obstacle to the full development of human capacities. The virtuous atheist is saved by his lack of consistency. Rigorous intellectual consistency would push him eventually towards a more willful nihilism, something which is apparent in the gradual decline of dialectical materialism and humanistic existentialism in favor of the full blown nihilism of the postmoderns. This is because the consistent atheist has no real reason for hope in anything except his own finite powers --and even then he lives in the knowledge that those powers will eventually be overtaken by age and death, if they do not yield before then to superior violence. Organization in such a universe comes about only through violence. The drive to creativity itself becomes a form of predation. Another way of putting this is to say that effective action on behalf of justice presupposes pursuit of the Truth, and the notion that there is any such thing as justice in the first place presupposes the existence of that Truth which the Catholic tradition has always held to be convertible with the Beautiful, the Good, and the One, --and with God.
Second, we should note that atheism is not the only sort of nihilism. On the contrary, "theologies" which, however much they claim to glorify God, do so at the expense of the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe, which is seen as something over and against God, as opposed to the free and necessary manifestation of God’s own essential Goodness, thereby make God into a finite albeit very powerful system and ultimately opt for an ontology of violence. This is certainly the case with Evangelical Christianity, which understands God as the inscrutable divine sovereign God of a universe which, while subject to Him, is not naturally ordered to the Good. Indeed, from this point of view there is no Good as such. The good is good merely because God wills it. Human beings, in pursuing their own development, in striving to become like God, sin against the divine majesty and fall into a depravity which is radical precisely because it is rooted in the most fundamental impulses of their nature. Salvation comes only by turning to God in trusting submission and indeed consists in little more than that submission. This is a vision of a universe driven by power, not by truth, and the fact that the greatest power calls itself God does not make the vision any more benign.
Now there are, undoubtedly very few in this audience who would embrace what I have called the "Evangelical" vision in all its rigor. Indeed, many if not most of you are probably repulsed by it. But I would like to suggest that the affectively driven spirituality which is dominant in the present period is simply a "soft" evangelicalism and is ultimately just as destructive. The argument on behalf of this claim is simple and straightforward, even if the claim itself may seem counterintuitive. If we say that spiritual development is driven by the intellect, we say that it is driven by knowledge of the Good. Sin is only possible because of the darkening of the intellect which results ultimately from our finitude and immediately from distortions in the social structure (and thus in the Agent Intellect) which arise from the pursuit of the Good under conditions of scarcity. Any conversion or any turning towards God will, similarly, be rooted in and affirming of our own deepest nature and our own best impulses. And it will be an affirmation first and foremost of the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe and the ordering of all things to the Good. Otherwise, a turn to God would not make any sense and reason would forbid it. If, on the other hand, we say that spirituality is affectively driven (and not merely supported by the movement of the appetites following the lead of sense and intellect) then sin represents a free and willful turning from God indicative of the most profound perversity. Indeed, the only way such a turning away from God could be explained would be if there were some fundamental contradiction between the internal dynamics of our own development and the end which God calls us to serve. Any conversion or turning to God, similarly, could only be a yielding without seeing, a submission to an authority the warrants for which are unclear and as yet ungrounded and thus a negation of the fundamental dignity and integrity of the human person and of human nature. The result is to render human life and indeed the universe as a whole ultimately meaningless, except in so far as they bend to the alien will of an inscrutable God, and to pit spirituality against the progress of the human civilizational project.
Both forms of evangelicalism, furthermore, represent a reflex of and tend to reinforce the market order and thus help to hold back the development of human capacities. What, after all, is the inscrutable divine sovereign of the evangelicals but an imaginative way of expressing our own helplessness in the face of a market order which rewards not talent or labor but rather blind submission to its arbitrary imperatives? Whether we understand salvation as "accepting Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and savior" or prefer the ecumenically more diplomatic formula "letting go and letting God" we form people intellectually and morally for submission and resignation rather than to take active responsibility for the development of their own capacities and for participating actively in the task of organizing and directing the course of the human civilizational project. The more rigorous form of Evangelicalism promotes cringing fear; the soft form promotes spiritual sloth.
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But why dialectics? It is one thing to demonstrate the leading role of the intellect in spiritual development, and to show the role of just action –and of a social order which promotes just action—in the development of the intellect; it is quite another thing to claim that if people are to develop spiritually they must travel a road which even its advocates, from Socrates forward, have intended only for a select few. Aren't there other roads towards spiritual development as well which do not suffer from the defects of the Evangelical way? The answer, of course, is that there are. Here the role of habituation is central (Aquinas. Summa Theologiae. I-II.55). Where local communities which are ordered to the Good remain intact –e.g. a village community or a tight urban neighborhood-- people are formed naturally in a way which leads them to take a certain understanding of the Good, and a regular pattern of just action, for granted. This “taking for granted” in turn presupposes the willingness to believe which we call faith (Aquinas. Summa Theologiae I-II.62, II-II.1-16), and which may be either natural (e.g. believing our parents and teachers when they tell us it is good to learn or the use our talents to serve the community) or supernatural and properly theological (e.g. believing the Church when it tells us that all our learning and striving are ordered not just to human development and social progress but to an end which transcends anything a finite mind can imagine or comprehend). When we act this faith gives rise to a connatural knowledge of God, be it natural or supernatural and caritative. This knowledge then forms the basis for the movement of the will, and thus the cultivation of justice and the other moral virtues and, if the action is supernaturally just, of the theological virtues of hope and charity. Thus, even in the case of those with no formal education, who have made little or no progress in the theoretical virtues, intellectual development leads moral development. It is just that the acts of the intellect in question are faith and connatural wisdom rather than theoria as such.
This sort of connatural wisdom operates even in societies where the larger structure has become deformed by, for example, the advent of a warlord state. Thus, throughout the great tributary empires which dominated the planet between 3000 B.C.E. and 1500 C.E., village communities throughout the world conserved a sense of the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe and its ordering to the good which they articulated imaginatively in the cult of the Magna Mater, a cult which not infrequently inspired the people to struggle to restore the traditional rights of the village communities and thus unleash the development of human creative capacities. Israel took a different path, transforming the Canaanite cult of the warlord God El into that of a God --‘El yahwi sabaoth yisrael-- who wages war on behalf of the poor. But this path as well depended on the existence of intact village communities, the mishpahoth, which gave people a basis in experience for the notion of ordering to an end, and thus for the idea of the Good, on which Israel’s struggle for liberation depended.
The difficulty is that the sorts of communities which have made possible the cultivation of connatural knowledge of God without mediation of discursive reasoning are precisely the communities which are disintegrating under the impact of market relations. That is why most of the people who come to mind when we think of the wisdom which comes from just action tend to be older and they tend to come from tight rural communities or urban neighborhoods. For most people, growing up in a highly marketized society, characterized by fragmentation and consumerism, this road simply isn’t open any more. By taking for granted the principles and values taught by the milieu in which they come of age, they become not wise and just but rather shallow and weak, easily manipulated by those who determine whether or not they will have the means to realize the one good they know: consumption. Under such circumstances authentic intellectual and moral development presupposes a break with what is “taken for granted,” and begins not so much with faith as with dialectics. It is only by drawing out the implications and contradictions of the very limited and often deformed understanding of the Good which we are afforded by the market order that we can rise to a sufficient grasp of what is Good to make possible even ordinary justice, much less caritas, and come to the point where we find it reasonable to respond in faith to the revealed wisdom of which the Church is the custodian.
Thus the necessity of dialectics. By dialectics we mean simply the discipline, first developed by Socrates and extended by Plato, Aristotle, and the great medieval Aristotelians, which leads us from the data of the senses and the images which we garner from them to increasingly higher truths, by means of drawing out the contradictions and limitations in our existing ideas and driving towards a higher synthesis.
A first approximation of this method and doctrine is laid out by Plato in the Republic. Plato argues that those who rule the city, the Guardians, must be knowers of the Good --and that they can become knowers of the Good only through a long process of theoretical and practical education. This education begins with gymnastic and music (which for the Greeks included all those activities over which the Muses presided, roughly corresponding to the later liberal arts). This training, which the guardians share with their military auxiliaries, lasted until about 15-18, after which there was a period of military training. Those selected as Guardians then proceed to the study of more advanced mathematics and, after the age of 30, to the study of dialectics in the narrower sense, or logic. This is to be followed by a long period of political service in subordinate posts between the ages of 35 and 50 only after which Guardians are called to membership in the High Council which devotes itself at once to philosophical reflection and to governing the city (Republic 376e-412b, 521c-541b).
This means that the dialectic by which we rise to first principles is both theoretical and practical. It begins with a solid grounding in the arts, especially the arts of argument. We must master the process of drawing out the implications and internal contradictions of our own ideas and those of others and driving towards a higher synthesis. This, in turn prepares us to engage the people regarding their interests and projects, drawing out their latent potential, wrestling with difficult social contradictions, and gradually leading the polis, as we ourselves are led, to seek a higher good.
Already in the Republic we find the basic metaphilosophical commitments in terms of which we have defined the underlying unity of the dialectical tradition. While Plato is well aware of the distortions which can enter into our perceptions of the world, he defends the ability of the intellect to rise above these limits and know things as they actually are (Republic 509d-521b). He argues that it is the Good which brings the universe into being, advancing a rudimentary sort of teleological cosmology (Republic 502c-509c), even if, as we shall see, he later contradicts himself on this point. He is clear on the existence of a transcendental first principle which is at once a principle of explanation and a criterion of ethical judgement (Republic 502c-509c). And he elaborates an ethics in which human action, the human soul, and human society are all ordered to the Good (Republic 427c-445b). His criticism of moneymaking and thus of the marketplace is quite explicit (Republic 399e). What the historical dialectics of Hegel, Marx and their interpreters add to this account is a discovery of the way in which the development of human civilization and the struggle to build a social order which permits the full realization of human capacities deepens our understanding of what the Good is, so that the ascent to first principles is not merely an individual life journey but also a collective historical process.
Two questions remain. First, in what sense is the via dialectica an adequate response to the reality of sin as we have analyzed it above? Is it not a purely human response to structures we have acknowledge cannot be broken by purely human means? And what is the relationship between the via dialectica and the higher, supernatural levels of development to which we are called?
The first question is less difficult to answer than it might seem. It must be remembered that while the via dialectica is a human path in the sense of being traveled by human beings according to the natural light of their own reason, it is also and at the same time a response to God. Two factors are at issue here. On the one hand, precisely because sin does not result in a complete loss of the image of God within us, precisely because we retain something of our natural ordering to the Good, we are always deeply in contradiction with those psychological and social structures in which sin has become embedded, and which always and only negate our deepest convictions and defeat our deepest desires. Human societies remain an integral part in the larger structure of a universe which is always and only ordered to God and which is thus structured in such a way as to defeat sin and social injustice. Sin and social injustice, in short, simply don’t work and this fact is accessible to reason and experience. Habituation to the pursuit of any good less than God inevitably leaves us profoundly dissatisfied. And the tributary and market structures which arise from and reinforce such habituation hold back social progress and lead inevitably to social crisis. Second, sin never entirely blinds us to the incredible Beauty of God who thus draws us back on the path of wholeness and justice. Thus, it was the discovery that the tributary social order which had emerged in Canaan, with its systematic exploitation of the peasantry and its worship of ba'al (the name means lord, master, owner of land --and husband, and is a reflex of the peasants submission to their oppressors) lead to social stagnation and disintegration which impelled Israel to take up arms against her oppressors (Gottwald 1979). And once she had been drawn into this struggle Israel was able to see in her remarkable victories over technologically superior adversaries what baalism, as a social and religious system had obscured: that all things are in fact ordered to God, and that justice ultimately prevails. ‘El yahwi sabaoth yisrael, El who brings into being the armies of Israel is also, at the same time, the creator of heaven and earth. Plato's Academy, similarly, was never simply a school. It was also a locus of political organizing (Wood 1978), a center for resistance to the market order which had gripped the Mediterranean basin, and it was also a religious community, a sanctuary dedicated to the Muses who are nothing if not an imaginative representation of the incredible beauty, the attractive power of God.
The internal contradictions of all systems infected by sin and injustice, and the attractive power of God: these are the mechanisms of grace which shatter the structures of sin and injustice and, by their inexorable law compel all things to serve the Good.
The answer to the second question proceeds along lines similar to the answer to the first. The conversion which we have when, at the end of the via dialectica, we recover our knowledge of the existence of God and the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe and thus our reason for doing justice is just a beginning and the truth we know and the justice we do as a result of it are pitiful things indeed compared to the divine truth and justice to which we are called. At the same time, the underlying dynamic of spiritual development remains the same. Spiritual development continues, in other words, to be driven by the internal contradictions of our limited perspective and the attractive power of God. Let us examine in greater depth how this works.
The ordinary knowledge we have of God through (transcendental) abstraction is only of God in relation to the universe, not of God as such. We know God in the mirror of natural beauty, not as Beauty itself, as a principle which helps us to explain the universe, not as the Truth itself, as our supreme good and not as the Good itself. And the divine esse and unity seem merely requirements of logic, themselves forever shrouded in darkness. This means that our natural love of God is, in a certain sense, love of God as a means. We love God because God is our creator, the principle of our existence and the condition for the full development and exercise of our capacities. This kind of love is not to be disparaged. It is not sinful or even selfish. It is, on the contrary right and just --the part of justice which Thomas calls the virtue of religion. But it is not love of God for God’s own sake, and it will not satisfy us. This is because, however noble the human condition, it is ordered to higher ends and those who love it as the highest good will inevitably be frustrated when they learn, as we all inevitably do, that the universe is not in fact structured to serve us. Only a love which loves the highest Good for its own sake will leave us at peace with a universe which is ordered to that Good and with our place therein. Revealed knowledge of God presupposes a love of God which is not merely a drive towards the realization of our own already comprehended dynamic of development (though it always also remains that) but a love of God which draws us into a dynamic of development which we do not yet understand, and which we do not yet, therefore, experience as our own. It presupposes a "supernatural connaturality" with God. Thus 'el yahwi sabaoth yisrael, God known through natural connaturality as the condition of the people's liberation, is recognized by the ordinary transcendental abstraction which arises on the basis of this connaturality as Being itself, the first principle of explanation and of action, the arche and telos of the universe and of human life. But as the struggle for justice passes over into a pursuit of something which transcends any merely human development, we achieve a supernatural connaturality with God, and on the basis of this advance to the "superabstraction" of revelation --to a wordless knowledge beyond all concepts, a knowledge of the great Unnamable-Bringing-into-Being, which at once awakens and satisfies the deepest and most burning fires of love.
What happens here is that the will is formed by habituation, at first simply to the struggle for justice, as a means to the realization of one's own latent potential and that of the people to whom one is connected. But as one participates in this struggle, it becomes clear that often, from an individual standpoint, more is lost than is gained. And this experience is not just individual. It is collective as well. No sooner had the people of Israel recognized the hand of God in their amazing victories over enemies which far outmatched them in terms of military might, than that hand was withdrawn, or extended in ways that seemed directed to some end other than their own temporal well being. It is at this point that one realizes that the struggle isn't about me, that it isn't even about us, if indeed it is about anything at all, and that any attempt to name what it is about --while necessary and even, within limits, satisfying, risks limiting its scope in a way which will inevitably lead to idolatry and disappointment. The struggle is about this Unnamable-Bringing-Into-Being which we experience in being called each and every day to become more than we are and which we learn to discover as much in the disappointments as in the successes, as these point us towards an ever deeper appreciation of divine nature. It is in this way that the divine name, YHWH, is revealed.
In this sense, it is quite correct to say that the movement from natural to revealed knowledge of God always involves a negative moment, that for growth towards the higher degrees of the spiritual life the via negativa is indispensable. In following the light we are always and only drawn into what at first seems like darkness. Gradually, to be sure, we become habituated to this new and more subtle light, and learn a free and easy love for the objects it reveals to us. But even so, if we are not to stagnate, we are always and only called to move on, to penetrate ever deeper into mysteries which are deeper and harder and which stretch us until we become, ever so gradually, something more than merely human.
One note of caution is in order. This higher love to which we are called and in which we are schooled by the trials and tribulations of living out our vocation to justice is not a self-sacrificial love and it is not pitted against the natural desire to realize our own potential. It merely exceeds it. It is a dedication to life which runs over the limits of our own finite living and finds rest only in the living God. Negativity is never an end in itself; there is no merit in continuing to follow in darkness when light and comprehension are within our reach.
The passage to this second conversion is not, however, any easy matter. It involves what has traditionally been called the "dark night of the soul" or, more specifically, the first of these nights, that of the senses. Most of the treatises on this subject treat it from the standpoint of the contemplative religious life, so that even active religious (much less the great body of the laity) are left without real guidance. Even the Dominican Garrigou-Lagrange (1938) gives only a broad indication of the specific forms this dark night takes among those who lead an active or active/contemplative life. The result is an excessive emphasis on trials experienced in contemplation: an inability to see God in the universe as we once did, and a loss of appetite for prayer and contemplation. Now it is not that these things will not be experienced by those who lead a more active life, on the contrary. But they are apt to be both linked to and overshadowed by trials of a quite different kind, which tend to preoccupy us and which seem to explain our difficulties in contemplation, so that we may never realize that we are in the midst of the dark night, but may simply think we have become lazy or even that we are experiencing a fundamental crisis of faith. For the active person, the dark night involves, first and foremost, difficult struggles and setbacks which bring home the reality of our own finitude, and the fact that the universe is not ordered to us, but rather we to the universe and ultimately to a divine plan or teleology which, however rational, is beyond the comprehension of any finite mind. The result is that God seems to have abandoned us. The beautiful and nurturing power which we thought we had found in the moment of our conversion is no longer there. We are left to fail miserably at what we are doing, to get sick, and eventually to die.
That this kind of crisis can be hard on our contemplative life should come as no surprise. A universe which before seemed full of brilliant colors suddenly becomes dark and grey. God, who just a minute ago, it seems, was everywhere --in the brilliant leaves of autumn, in a kitten's play, in the beauty and power of our work-- is suddenly gone. And when God is gone, so is that easy affection with which we loved the God of the autumn leaves and of our own success.
At this point several options are open to us. Some, in fact, actually despair and turn back to nihilism and darkness. For these the dark night is an authentic crisis of faith. Others --the majority, probably, of those whose first conversion was complete and secure-- forge ahead in the darkness, but never really learn, except in brief moments of insight and vision, the truth it was meant to teach. One crisis passes and is followed by a time of renewed joy which provides strength for the next trial. And so it continues until death. Spiritual life becomes a matter of keeping the faith, of perseverance and fortitude, rather than of growing joy. Life is lived out in the dark night.
A few, however, make the passage to what is known as the illuminative way (Garrigou-Lagrange 1938). They learn to see God not only in what is obviously good for them, but also in their trials and tribulations. They begin to find meaning even in events which would seem to question the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe. And they find themselves loving this strange God who constantly surprises us with Her elegant strategy and wily tactics. They feel honored to have been called to play some small role in Her plan and begin not to mind so much that they are no longer being nurtured like little ones. It is as if, having learned to love God as nurturing Mother, they now must learn to love Her as a brilliant and challenging teacher (Wisdom 7: 22), and eventually as a leader in a struggle which we are gradually beginning to understand is about far, far more than ourselves (Wisdom 10-19). It is experiences of this kind, which make it possible to understand the revealed mysteries --especially the dark ones, such as the tribulations of Israel or the crucifixion.
Once again we must point out the dangers which face us at this level. The dark night is not about learning self-sacrifice or self-sacrificial love. On the contrary, an obsession with self-sacrifice and martyrdom is one of the ways in which the transition to the dark night can be short-circuited. It is a way of refusing to live through the darkness we have entered, either by actually dying, or by providing too easy an answer to the question of meaning which is re-posed at this point in our spiritual development. For if God is about self-sacrifice, then all the suffering makes perfect sense. The mystery, and the contact with the infinite and incomprehensible, is dissolved every bit as completely as it is for the arrogant rationalist. Carried through to its logical conclusions, furthermore, an emphasis on divine self-sacrificial love transforms the God of life into a God of death and thus into something other than God entirely. And martyrdom is, after all, still about us. No, navigating the dark night means learning the discipline of doing what God requires of us even after it has become apparent that the struggle is not only or primarily about us. It means staying in the darkness and becoming accustomed to it. Only then will the skies clear, so that we can "once again see the stars. (Alighieri. Commedia, III.33)."
It is also possible to complete the second conversion successfully, but then to stagnate. As in the case of the first conversion, this results from absolutizing the form of knowledge which has already been achieved, and forgetting the higher tasks which still lie ahead for us as participants in an infinite Universe. Most commonly this means taking excessive pride in our status as servants of God, and in the intellectual and moral sophistication we have acquired as a result, and assuming that this is the very pinnacle of spiritual development. Especially for those who are conscious of having successfully traversed a difficult road, of having persevered through a long dark night, which has not so much ended as cleared to reveal the beauty of the stars, there can also be a kind of second-order cynicism, and a contempt for those who find in God an easy joy, and in service to God a straightforward realization of their talents. Gradually this shades into a kind of spiritual aristocratism, fed by the notion that it is only the hardened few who can really undertake the business of the universe in a serious or significant way, and who can handle the knowledge that this business isn't always pretty. At the end of this road lies an arrogant claim of responsibility for the universe which is ultimately very difficult to distinguish from theistic or god-building nihilism. It is sometimes difficult to discern this spiritual deformation because, in Christian contexts, at least, it is often bound up with an ideology of self-sacrificial love, so that one cannot tell if the individual in question is liquidating the dark night in advance by rendering suffering transparently meaningful, if they are suffering from the spiritual deformity we have been discussing, or if they are authentically saintly and wholly devoted to the service of God (even if their theology is a bit confused).
The second conversion is not, in any case, the end of the road. Indeed, the "end" is nothing other than God as such. Our calling as human beings, as matter, is nothing less than to actually become God. Being loyal and effective servants of God, even servants who take more pleasure in God than in ourselves, is only a stage along the way. But here we seem to confront a barrier of insuperable proportions. To become God means to be infinite, and the whole journey of spiritual development has thus far been nothing if not a lesson in our own finitude. And the more proficient we are in our service, the sooner we rediscover this finitude and find ourselves in the midst of a second "dark night" --what the tradition has historically referred to as the dark night of the spirit. For it appears that what God does with servants after their long lives of usefulness is to discard them.
At issue here is not so much a questioning of the promise of eternal life, as a probing of the meaning of this promise, a probing which ends up in questioning its value from a human standpoint. For those who have studied the matter deeply know that neither the scriptures nor the tradition really offer much hope of anything like a straightforward personal immortality, an afterlife which is experienced as more or less a continuation of this life. Even those who, like Thomas, uphold the natural subsistence and thus the immortality of the soul, argue that without the body we have no access to fundamentally new knowledge --that we are, in fact, no longer really full and complete human persons. And the promise of the Resurrection of the body, even if it is affirmed in faith, remains so shrouded in obscurity that it offers precious little comfort. In what sense is my reconstructively resurrected self really me? These are questions that trouble all believers, but they are especially difficult for the proficient servant of God, who has learned deeply and profoundly that God's work is about so much more than any one individual that it may as well disregard the individual entirely. We have no claim on God. There is no good reason why a finite system ought to experience eternity. But if this is so, then of what significance is our modest service? Doesn't this make our lives ultimately meaningless after all? Once again the world seems drained of color. The stars do not simply become clouded over; they seem to disappear entirely.
There are, to be sure, ways to avoid this second dark night. The easiest is simply to plunge ourselves back into our work --to keep focused on our service and not face questions about its ultimate meaning and value at the court of an infinite God. And for some, this works --though it also closes them off to achieving a higher wisdom. Others, though, will find that this path leads them into the spiritual arrogance we spoke of above, or that the opportunity for usefulness is closed off to them entirely. For it is one thing to find that our efforts and our projects seem to be in vain; it is quite another thing to have no possibility to contribute.
The exit from this second dark night comes only in the realization that becoming God --which is our deepest desire and our true calling-- involves ceasing to be simply human. We cannot continue to be our finite selves and still grow beyond finitude towards God. With this knowledge we pass to the unitative way.
Of course God always already Is. And as infinite, God excludes nothing. In reality we have always been in God and always will be. What we lose in death is our finite knowledge of a limited region of space-time, our selves developing across that region and, if we rise to first principles, of God as the first principle. But God's knowing includes and contains that knowing, and includes it as a real knowing, known better than we ever have or ever could know it. What remains is a knowledge of the world and of ourselves in and through God --a knowledge which is joyful or painful in whatever degree our use of our talents represents a cause for joy or sorrow.
There can be no doubt that the passage to this higher knowledge is painful. All growing is also a parting, and even those who were anxious to grow up soon learn to look back on childhood with nostalgia. There is a freshness and an openness to what seems like an infinite future with infinite possibilities which has been lost. But almost no one --certainly no one who has lived a good life-- would actually choose to go back, to forfeit the gains we have made, which are far greater than the mere possibility which has been lost. Rather we take joy in the freshness and potential of our own children and students, guiding them as best we can into a future in which that freshness will become ripe and the possibility actual. Through the second dark night and the third conversion we learn to look on death in the same way.
But more is at issue here than a theological reflection on individual eschatology. When the servant of God lets go of his or her finitude and begins to see with God's eyes, the result is an authentic union with God --a real foretaste of the beatific vision. Knowing God in essence, we see the whole universe, all of human history, and our own lives, in the light of that essence. The supernatural act of the will, a perfect charity, follows with ironclad necessity. We become perfectly free, but are still in our freedom because we know the Good with such clarity that our will cleaves to it and remains there, caught in joy, having no reason to stir.
From this state we can bring no discursive knowledge. And we may, at first, experience it with terror, as an obliteration of the intellect and an overwhelming of the senses. This is because our capacity for knowledge and love and sensation and pleasure has been exceeded. Were we able to remain in this ecstatic state long enough, perhaps our minds would clear and, still transfixed in joy, we would once again become capable of real discourse. Such, at least, is our hope for the beatific vision itself, which we will experience not on the basis of our own finite bodies, with their limited internal and external senses and potential intellects, but in God, whose infinite capacities we will engage to the full extent of our own particular development.
It should be noted that all three conversions involve judgements and a consequent act of the will, on the basis of which an immediate, connatural and preconceptual knowledge of God becomes possible. In the case of the first conversion, the judgement in question is an affirmation of the basic meaningfulness of the universe and thus of the reality of God. In the case of the second conversion, it is a judgment of the value of God as such, and not simply as our principle of explanation, our good, the object of our contemplation. In both cases the judgements are judgements of ascent --ascending from the universe to God, in the first case by affirmation (God is our Good), in the second case by negation (God is not merely our Good). In the case of the third conversion, the judgement in question is one of descent. It is a judgment of our own existence, and that of the universe, in God, and thus marks a higher degree of connaturality. But as at all degrees of knowledge, the foundation remains our connaturality with the object known, and ultimately with God, who is the arche and telos of all things.
Throughout the process, while the appetites are certainly fully engaged --indeed they are integral to spiritual development-- the driving force remains the intellect, which proceeds either directly by perceiving a Good which then moves the will, or indirectly by recognizing the internally contradictory character of our attachment to limited goods and driving towards a higher synthesis. And the intellect is nothing other than (at the natural level) human society itself and (at the supernatural level) the whole cosmohistorical evolutionary process which leads towards God, participation in which makes us connatural with these structures and illuminates the images we garner from experience, revealing their intelligible content. Spirituality and justice are one along the via dialectica, and along the mystical way of the noche oscura which is simply its extension into realms which transcend the merely human and into those which are properly divine.
***
This is, to be sure, only an introduction to the spiritual life --an attempt to ascertain in just what the spiritual life consists, and to correct certain errors which have become commonplace. The point of course (to paraphrase a great Jewish doctor) is not merely to know what life is, but rather to live it. And this requires not only clear vision but also great fortitude and perseverance in the face of adversity and uncertainty. Among other things it will require a willingness to stand against the market order, which holds back the development of human capacities, but which has on its side the greatest economic, political-military, and ideological apparatus ever built by humanity. Spiritual growth and security, wrote Ignazio Silone, are incompatible (Silone 1955). Those who follow this path will find that they will be stretched to their very limits --and then some-- as God draws out their full humanity, and then from that humanity cultivates a connaturality with the divine nature itself. Along the way, however, they will find themselves guided by an ever deepening knowledge, so that they rapidly emerge from the darkness and despair which prevail in the present period into the light of the sun, which shows things as they are, and then into the clear and cold light of the stars, which shows why and for what they are, and at long last into the light of the Empyrean heaven where knowing and loving and being are indistinguishable in the One in Whom and through Whom all things are.
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