Christian spiritualities in History

The writer of this article is a professor of the history of spirituality and has written a variety of books and articles. In the following pages he gives us an overview of the various spiritualities which have given life to the Church throughout the centuries. In this context he indicates the depth of the spirituality of unity proposed by Chiara Lubich.

Fabio Ciardi

What is a spirituality?

To appreciate the newness of what Chiara Lubich has proposed regarding collective spirituality it will be useful to take a look at the development of spirituality throughout the Church’s history. We can understand something better by comparing it with others.

First and foremost, what is a spirituality? It’s a way of living the Gospel, a Christian lifestyle. Although the Christian life is one, it is experienced in different ways, giving rise to different spiritualities. This diversity of expression is due to a whole series of factors which can be reduced to two, namely, a dynamic to do with the nature of the Gospel and the Church as well as the phenomenon of history and culture.

The first set of reasons for the multiplicity of spiritualities has to do with the understanding which is never complete of the Gospel. The Spirit of Truth introduces the Church gradually into the whole Truth — as the Vatican Council puts it — with an understanding which progresses "through the contemplation and study of believers...and the intimate sense of spiritual realities which they experience" (DV, 8).

Spiritualities thus appear as the progressive experience of the Christian mystery. This progress is an ever greater, more free and conscious participation in the life of Christ in the Church and a gradual assimilation of Gospel values. The Spirit introduces us into the "deeper understanding of spiritual things" which enables us to grasp the Christian mystery from a particular perspective. Through the initiative of the Spirit, men and women emerge who give rise to charismatic movements and who offer new spiritualities to the Church. The Spirit opens their minds so that they understand the Scriptures (Lk 24:25). The Spirit makes them interpreters and exegetes of Christ's teaching.

The second set of reasons for the multiplicity of spiritualites has to do with the cultural and social context in which they appear. The Word of God is "efficacious" and works in the lives of individuals and peoples. Because of that, spiritualities which are born from the Word of God and are at its service, aren't abstract without any fruits, but interpret human needs and penetrate the social fabric, by responding to what is lacking and throwing light on the cultural conquests of the time. The spiritual charisms appear as interventions of the Spirit directed to guide history. The Spirit who examines and knows the secrets of God (1 Cor 2:11), examines and knows also the secrets of the human heart and the needs of the times. The Spirit knows the cries and groaning of every generation and so brings to light, in a new way, those Gospel dimensions which reply the most to the times. In this way, the Spirit helps the situation and problems of the Church and the world, even if the Gospel values of which the spiritualities are bearers, are themselves perennial. In every historical moment of crisis, difficulty and transformation, the Spirit, with his creativity, reproposes the fruitful vitality of the Gospel and so Christ continues, in a way which is always new, to be the light which enlightens every human being who comes into the world.

Spiritualities appear like the Gospel inculturated, indeed the Gospel which is making history, the Gospel incarnated in a particular culture, in a particular people, in a concrete political and economical situation.

The very word "spirituality" indicates the source of these ways of living the Gospel: the Spirit. It’s the Holy Spirit who lights up the words of the Gospel one by one, throughout the Church’s history, helps us understand them more deeply all the time, and teaches us how to live them. That’s one of his tasks. We remember Jesus’s promise to his disciples, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will lead you into the whole truth, He will take what is mine and reveal it to you” (Jn 16, 13-15). Every spirituality is like an expansion of a word of the gospel by the Holy Spirit.

I’d like to show, very briefly, how there have been many ways of living the Gospel, many Christian lifestyles, many spiritualities.

The experience of the first Christians in Jerusalem

The Church manifested at Pentecost became visible in the first community at Jerusalem. We can say that the spirituality of the first Christians is not so much a spirituality as the spirituality. On the day of Pentecost, at Jerusalem, the Holy Spirit descended in his fullness, leading the first Christians directly into the deepest dimension of the Gospel: the new commandment, unity. He taught them the lifestyle the Word wished to bring on earth, the lifestyle, if we can speak this way, of the Trinity, that is Love, Unity, Communion.

Even though there were difficulties and tensions from the beginning, the life of the community was characterized by unity straightaway. We all remember what the Acts of the Apostles say — the believers met together to pray, were united in hearing the experience the apostles shared of their time with Jesus, they were of one heart and one mind, put their goods in common. The Holy Spirit fused them into unity. That life of the first community in Luke’s description, is like an ideal sketch, a model of what the life of the Church should always be — it’s the christian life in its most charismatic moment, at Pentecost.

In the Church at Pentecost, there are contained, as if incandescently, all the words of the Gospel. We can compare it to the theory of the Big Bang, which holds that all the energy present at the origin of the universe was set free, giving rise to the galaxies, stars, planets: at the beginning, all that energy was completely condensed in one point. So too, the fullness of the life of Pentecost had to be expanded throughout the ages, and, in contact with history, to give rise to many spiritualities.

This is where the Holy Spirit is at work, unfolding each of the words of the Gospel throughout the whole life of the Church. It’s the Holy Spirit who, you could say, ‘opens out’ the initial unity, and gradually sets free all the richness contained in it. It’s a journey both of suffering and enthusiasm. In a gradual increase the Church is led towards the fullness of life and of the initial charismatic density. The final consummation will be even more beautiful than the beginning. The words of the Gospel will all return towards the initial unity from which they have been set free, but after they’ve been translated into life and having carried out the works of God. In this way we can understand how all the charisms, all the spiritualities, are born of the unique source of the Spirit, of Pentecost, and are all destined to return to unity.

The Quest for God in Solitude

One of the first words the Spirit reveals to his Church is the commandment, ‘Love God with all your heart, with your whole soul, with all your strength.’ So, a few years after the experience of the first Christians, we see the birth of a particular way of living the Gospel, a spirituality.

Some Christians feel moved by the Spirit to withdraw into solitude, into the desert — these are the hermits (the Greek anachórein means: to draw apart, to distance oneself from). We can understand the appearance of the desert spirituality if we remember that the Gospel radicality that marks the beginnings of the Christian life had become gradually watered down. The life of the desert fathers became, as it were, a substitution for the martyrdom that had, for historical reasons, become much rarer.

The first to choose this way of life was St. Anthony, abbot, who lived in Egypt during the 3rd century. One Sunday in church, when he was 18-20 years old, he heard the Acts of the Apostles being read, where it spoke of the first Christians selling all they had and bringing it to the Apostles. He was deeply impressed by this. The following Sunday, the passage of the Gospel which was read was where Jesus says, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have, give it to the poor, then come follow me.” Anthony felt these words were just for him, so he sold all he had, gave it to the poor, entrusted his sister, who would have been left on her own, to Christian women, and gave himself completely to God.

He went to live on his own, outside the village, and spent some years in prayer. Then he moved further away into the Egyptian desert, to be ever more alone with God. Others, attracted by his reputation for holiness, imitated him. The desert, or other lonely places, ‘flowered’ as was said at that time through the living presence of men and then women. Many of them reached holiness in a profound union with God.

"Nothing seems greater to me than this — wrote Gregory of Nazianzen — to silence one's senses, to leave the flesh of the world, to recollect oneself, no longer to be busy with human things, except for what's strictly necessary; to speak with oneself and with God, to lead a life that transcends visible things; to bring into the soul always pure, divine images, without mixture of earthly and misleading forms; to be truly an immaculate mirror of God, and to become ever more so; to rejoice in present hope of future good, to converse with angels; to have already left the earth, transported on high in spirit.'

The hermits went to God in solitude. Unlike the first Christians, theirs is a spirituality that greatly underlines the 'individual' aspect, even if it was always an 'ecclesial' one, because the monk is, by definition, the one who "separated from all, is united to all", as Evagrius Ponticus said.

Thanks to their ecclesial openness, they love the brothers. For example, they often help the poor with the fruit of their work. They pray for the whole Church, give hospitality to travellers, advise those who come to them in order to grow in the spiritual life.

However, their lifestyle isn't centred on love and service of the neighbour. It's based especially on prayer, on penance, on solitude with God. Their life of union with God radiates outwards, but their centre of gravity is within, motivated by love of God, by desire to live only for Him. They're inspired by the example of Elias, of John the Baptist, but especially by Jesus, who withdrew into the desert for 40 days, and who often, at night, went to pray alone on the mountain.

Love of solitude was so great for some hermits that the brother could get in the way of the quest for God. Chiara Lubich refers to one of these desert fathers, Arsenius, who said — "I can't be with God and with people at the same time." He loved the disciples who had gathered around him, drawn by his sanctity. In that same 'saying' of his, he also confessed: 'God knows how much I love you.' Yet, he wasn't able to reconcile love of God and love of the brothers. It seemed that to be with God he had to leave the brothers. Like most of the desert fathers, Arsenius was strongly influenced by the surrounding pagan culture, which considered that the spiritual and the human were two realities which couldn't be reconciled with each other.

Monasticism

It was quickly found that the way of holiness was easier when people helped each other. The monasteries developed, where the monks came together to journey more quickly towards God. This was the experience of Pacomius and Basil in the East, and of Augustine and Benedict in the West, and became the experience of much of monasticism in the first thousand years of Christianity.

The monks were persons who, united by fraternal love, helped each other to enter into close, personal relationship with God, and who were then ready to share their experience with others.

St. Basil’s way was especially significant. He lived in Asia Minor in the fourth century, was attracted by the desert fathers’ reputation for holiness, and went on pilgrimage to where they were most famous, Egypt, Syria, Palestine. But, thanks also to the deep relationship of communion with his own longtime friends, who would become saints with him, he quickly understood the importance of reciprocal help. When his disciples asked him if it was better to live alone or together, he explained to them the superiority of the common life. He understood how the human person, as God had willed, was capable of relationship, and so had the capacity to live the commandment of love. The natural social capacity of human beings is already a sign of the vocation to unity. He then explained to his disciples that by coming together it was easier to live the Gospel.

“The commandments are easily kept in greater number by many united together, while this doesn’t occur for whoever is on their own, because while he keeps one, by that very fact, he is impeded from keeping the other one[s]. In community life, the charism proper to each one becomes common to all who live with him. The solitary one doesn’t know his defects, nor is he aware of the progress he has made in works, because he doesn’t have the possibility of fulfilling the commandment. How can he show humility if there’s no one before he can be more humble? How can he show feelings of mercy, if he’s cut off from communion with others? And how can he exercise patience, if there’s no one opposing his will? According to the Gospel, we’re supposed to put ourselves in the last place, but if I’m alone, who can I put myself after? We’re supposed to wash each others’ feet, but if I’m alone, whose feet can I wash?"

If the desert fathers focused on the first commandment, it could be said that the Holy Spirit caused the monks to discover the second, ‘love your neighbour as yourself.’ With Basil, and especially with Augustine, the new commandment of mutual love also was emphasized. Augustine wrote at the beginning of his Rule for the little community that lived with him near Carthage:

“The essential reason that you’re united together is so that you might live in the house in the same spirit and that you have one soul and one heart aiming towards God.’'

Still, we should note that not even the experience of the monks gave rise to a ‘collective spirituality’ in the sense Chiara Lubich means today. In the monastic life, we come together to help each other progress on the way of holiness, but that way remains for the most part an individual way. The new commandment, of which the monks are well aware, isn’t translated into a ‘lifestyle’, it doesn’t give shape to the entire project of the spiritual journey.

What we can see, in monasticism, as in the life of the hermits, are instruments of sanctification which indicate clearly that monasticism too is a spirituality that can be called ‘individual.’ Chiara Lubich brings that out in her talk: solitude and the flight from creatures, silence, the convent and the veil, penances, fasts, vigils, poverty, chastity, obedience, the withdrawing into one’s own cell to pray and meditate. Such a way of living has its fascination, and a strong fascination for many because of the values it offers, and the profound quest for God it leads to.

The quest for God in the Mendicant Orders

We find these instruments of an ‘individual spirituality’ in all the other spiritualities that come to life, one after the other, in the Church, beginning with what are called the mendicant orders, Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, Augustinians.

We find them in St. Francis’ and St. Dominic’s way of holiness, even if their lifestyle is modelled on the words of the Gospel urging the gift of self, especially in preaching the good news.

The Holy Spirit made them discover the task Jesus entrusted to His disciples, when he sent them out to announce the Gospel in pairs, asking them not to take anything with them on the way, and to live in poverty. The friars of Francis and Dominic went, like the disciples, to the four corners of the earth to proclaim the Kingdom of God. They give witness to that fraternity that breaks all the barriers and all the feudal and aristocratic hierarchies so powerful in the society of that time.

The itinerant lifestyle started up by the Mendicants was more suitable for the changed situation. If in Benedict’s time, stability was necessary as a brake on the peoples’ too great mobility, now there was need for a new flexibility that enabled contact with the people. The friars’ going about from place to place to witness to the Gospel was an invitation to the new cities not to get closed in on themselves in a selfish defence of their own particular locality, but to open themselves out to universal brotherhood.

Francis and Dominic were able to interpret the new sensitivity and the new needs of the people expressed by the huge movement of the poor which had developed in Europe, and which, seeking a poor and simple Church, ended in frustration and heresy. Francis and Dominic lived and taught their friars a true poverty, penetrated by Gospel motivations opposed to the greed for money at their time. The highest poverty of spirit became their lifestyle.

The quest for poverty became ever more interiorized and brought Francis, in the last years of his life, also towards a physical solitude, that of Averna, in which the Spirit configured him to Christ, poor and crucified. He wrote as his last will to St. Claire, "I, Francis, a little brother, wish to follow the life and poverty of our most high Lord Jesus Christ and of his most holy Mother, and to persevere in that to the end."

The quest for God in the Rhineland mystics

The typical instruments of the individual spirituality are also to be found in the great spiritualities that flourished in the Low Countries and in Germany in the century from 1300 to 1400. These spiritualities are represented by famous names — Meister Eckhart, John Tauler, Henry Suso, Jan van Ruysbroeck. There’s the spirituality called the Rhineland spirituality, because it flourished in the Rhine valley, and there’s also what’s called the devotio moderna, tied up with the Flemish school. There’s a similar spiritual movement in England, whose doctrine is summarized in a famous work, The Cloud of Unknowing.

Even if in various ways, all these great spiritualities seek God in the ‘depth of the soul,’ as Meister Eckhart called it, since in this deepest part of our being, the generation of the Son and the movement of Trinitarian love occurs. So these mystics felt called to enter into themselves to find beyond themselves the most profound unity with God and to share in his life. Ruysbroeck writes:

"Our life is always essential and tends towards the origin of our being as a creature, where we live from God and through God, and God is in us and we in Him...This life is hidden in God and in the substance of our soul."

To attain this union with God we have to fully renounce ourselves, empty ourselves of everything, so that the ‘depth of the soul’ be fully open to God. Tauler asks: "Do you want God to be able to enter? Then, created things, and all that is in your possession should make room for Him." We become ever more aware of the value of our nothingness. Again, Tauler: "When God decided to create things, Nothing existed... So He created everything from Nothing. If God is to operate [in us] in his own specific way, the one thing he asks is that this Nothing alone should be present."

This is why this mystical current requires detachment from all creatures. Chiara refers to a line from the Imitation of Christ: ‘The greatest saints avoided when they could the company of others, and preferred to serve God in solitude.’

The quest for God in Christian Humanism

We’re now in the years 1400-1600. At the same time as we enter the modern epoch from the middle ages, there corresponds to the diversification of cultures a diversification of spiritualities. There’s a Spanish spirituality (Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross), an Italian spirituality (Anthony Mary Zaccaria, Gaetano of Thiene, Phillip Neri...), a French spirituality (Francis de Sales, Lallement, Bérulle, Olier..). We could note how the so called golden ages of Italy, Spain and France (from an economic, artistic, cultural, perspective), coincide with the happiest expressions of spirituality and of mysticism. There’s also the development of a Russian spirituality, that will achieve full self-awareness in the nineteenth century.

And alongside the Catholic spiritualities, the Protestant Reformation, speeding up the development of national identities, gives rise to a Protestant and Anglican lifestyle.

These spiritualities are affected by the new cultural climate of Humanism and the Renaissance. If in the medieval period the dominant note was the presence of God, with Humanism what is focused on is that God has entrusted the world to humans, who find themselves at the centre of the cosmos.

Spirituality now pays attention to the person, to his psychological interiority. The various movements of the soul are analyzed with a previously unknown depth, and the laws for the discernment of spirits are worked out. Spiritual psychology and spiritual direction are developed. It’s enough here to recall St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises, St. Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle, St. John of the Cross’s Ascent of Mount Carmel.

It’s a matter of a spirituality centred on the lived experience of the indwelling of the Trinity in the soul of the Christian. St. Teresa would say that the Trinity lives in the deepest dwelling of the interior castle, and one enters into intimate relationship with the Trinity especially through prayer, experienced, in Teresa’s words, as "a friendly relationship, taken up and desired many times over, actuated by oneself alone with the one we know loves us." It’s a demanding journey, calling for the complete emptying of self, the nada, as St. John of the Cross, calls it, the nothingness, the passing by means of the darkest nights, to arrive at full union with Christ and transformation in Him.

The spiritualities of service

In the centuries following the Council of Trent, new spiritualities arose which are fruit of a concrete attention to the daily needs of the people, especially of the poor, and of the least.

The saints felt called to respond to the great social needs: of sick to be cured, young people to be taught, poor to be helped... The Spirit led them to dedicate themselves to the service of humanity in all its miseries. This is the time of Sts. Camillus de Lellis, John of God, Vincent de Paul, John Baptist de la Salle, John Bosco. The Spirit reveals the words of the Gospel that revolve around the Final Judgment: "I was sick and you visited me, hungry and you gave me to eat...Every time you did it to the least of my brothers, you did it to me."

These are spiritualities of service, of concrete love, which increase in the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the amazing flourishing of the religious congregations, through which the Church appears really ‘equipped for every good work’(LG 12). To relieve the most varied poverty is, St. Vincent de Paul says, interpreting all the saints of charity, "to enter into his (Jesus’s) sentiments, to do what he did and to carry out what he commanded...And he himself wanted to be born poor, to have the poor in his company, to serve the poor, to put himself in the place of the poor, up to the point of saying that what we do for the poor he will consider done to his divine person."

The 20th Century’s Anxiety for Communion

Now we’ve arrived at our own century. A characteristic of the spiritualities of our time is the appreciation of the positive aspects of the world, and the going beyond being too Church-centred. It’s in the world that God’s plan has to be realized, and Christians are at the service of that plan: social commitment is an essential part of Christian spirituality. At the same time we know that at the end of the eighteenth century there were strong needs expressed for communion and unity. Many political, cultural, economic, religious factors speak of the need for communion. And of the tension towards a united world.

It’s enough to think of the various socialisms, and the birth of institutions like the League of Nations and then the United Nations. Science and technology have increased cultural exchange and brought the various peoples near to one another. In the field of the Church there’s a greater than ever awareness of the need for ecumenic dialogue between the Churches, and between all religions. Within the Catholic Church there’s the deepening understanding of the Church finding its high points in the encyclical on the Mystical Body (Mystici Corporis), and especially in Vatican II, which has given rise to a new desire for communion at all levels.

It’s as if a request for unity, almost a cry, arises from humanity and from the Churches today.

In the civil arena, there’s a movement from violent collectivization to unrestrained liberalism, from totalitarian politics to nationalistic separatism. All mistaken phenomena, that still indicate the need for an authentic communion capable of leading to unity in freedom and respect for identity.

Even in the life of the Church, all by now speak of Church-communion, even if they don’t know how to bring it about.

What’s required is that the Holy Spirit answers these needs, also because it’s He who put them into the hearts of the men and women of today. What’s needed, basically, are new ‘charisms’.

The Holy Spirit has, in this context, as always, chosen a concrete person, Chiara Lubich. Through her, the Spirit, who by nature is always creative, has brought about something new in the Church, giving it a ‘collective spirituality.’

Reading her talk on this point, I seemed to perceive the advent of a Copernican revolution. Just as it was discovered that it was the earth that went around the sun, not the sun that went round the earth, so with the collective spirituality one experiences that each of our lives revolves around the Trinity and the presence of Jesus in our midst, and in this new lifestyle, the Trinity and Jesus are found within us. It’s a true revolution in the Church and in humanity.

There’ve been moments in the Church’s history where spirituality is expressed in a communitarian way. It’s enough to think about the quotations from St. Basil, St. Augustine, or that highly unusual experience of St. Francis, when, at a moment of particular unity between his friars, Jesus appeared in their midst. But these were rare episodes, intuitions that never managed to put forward a spirituality completely focused on communion, on unity, to be lived each day. These needs and intuitions haven’t led to reciprocal love and to unity as the typical and constant mode of living Christianity. Christian living is not centred on the ‘that all may be one’ as its specific element.

Today, on the contrary, with the collective spirituality it seems to me that the dream constantly accompanying the Churches of those centuries, is being fulfilled: to make the Christian life of the early centuries blossom once more. After centuries of living many words of the Gospel one by one, in today's Pentecost, it seems the Spirit wants to bring the Church back to living the Gospel in a fuller manner, to find its early form in a new synthesis in which all the past is assumed, valued but also surpassed.