The subordination of religion to spirituality should erase neither asceticism nor mysticism. The essayist Jean Duchesne specifies that the challenge of the 21st century could be to become aware that spirituality, asceticism and mysticism are Christianly inseparable.
To prolong the reflection on the crisis of the Church, we can take up one of the innovations signaled by the 20th century in its history: the invention of spirituality. The expression may come as a surprise, because there has always been, in Christianity, in other religions and even without religious institutions, a spiritual life, that is to say inner experiences of relationships with realities not immediately perceptible. . Of course — except we didn’t use that word. It is therefore interesting to examine why and how we began to talk about spirituality as if it were self-evident and what this changed.
Universality of the “spiritual”
In his famous dictionary, composed around 1870, Émile Littré lists no less than 28 meanings of “spirit”. The adjective “spiritual” which derives from it is therefore equivocal, and the ending -ity, which makes it an abstract noun, does not shed much light. Spirituality is then roughly all that is “lived” without being physical or animal, but is not purely intellectual and includes affective dimensions. It is a reaction to the materialism that appeared with the Enlightenment. In French philosophy from the 19th centurycentury, we find a “spiritualism” (not really Christian for all that), whose figures (Ravaisson, Lachelier, Boutroux, Bergson, Lavelle…) are eclipsed by the Germans Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche…
In short, secularization does not at all mean that Christianity would find itself confronted only with an atheism denying all transcendence, but that it loses the monopoly of the “spiritual” in the West. Many agnostics and even anticlericals recognize that “the spirit” is part of the greatness of man. It is a word which bothers them less than “soul”, because the immortality attributed to the latter seems doubtful to them. But it is also the time when psychology, psychiatry and soon psychoanalysis appear and develop. In literature, Romanticism promoted the cult of the “self,” and Kandinsky in 1912 did not hesitate to speak of the “spiritual in art”—even modern and abstract.
Spirituality is to religion what culture is to civilizations
At the sociological level, introspection and individualism are favored by “progress” which improves security to comfort and provides education and leisure. The personal inner “lived” can suddenly flourish and allows a religiosity without organized worship or formal allegiance. A little in the same way that spirituality stands out from religion, simultaneously (and this is no doubt no coincidence), culture (a word little used up to now in this sense) shifts in relation to civilization, to designate all human phenomena (thought, arts, moral values) that genetic heritage is not enough to explain and of which institutions are only the products.
The Christian faith is of course affected, because what is now commonly called spirituality is not at all foreign to it. Jesus himself does not hide his feelings. Neither does Saint Paul. Saint Augustine analyzes himself with virtuosity. Monasticism responds to a need for an intense personal relationship with God. This relationship became secularized and feminized even at the end of the Middle Ages, with the devotio moderna. The two centuries following the Protestant Reformation saw an outbreak of mysticism in response: in Spain with Saint Ignatius of Loyola and the renovated Carmel of Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross, then in France with what would be baptized the ‘ “French School” (Oratorians, Sulpicians, Eudists…).
As a counterpoint to the modernist crisis and anticlericalism
The problem is that in France especially, largely under the influence of the austerity of degenerate Jansenism, people distrust mystical exaltations, the pure spiritual—namely, supernatural familiarity with the mystery of God. One suspects there diabolical temptations or pathological excesses. Sacramental and doctrinal discipline is preferred as safer, implemented in formal devotions which, in turn, reinforce it and encourage respect for moral laws. Piety consists of liturgical offices, recitations and readings of prayers, meditations (using objects such as the rosary and images), pilgrimages, novenas, retreats, etc. These practices are strictly ascetic, because in Greek askesis means exercise, training, preparation, which is obviously not limited to privations and penances.
Pastoral care (which does not yet have that name) then tends to clearly separate asceticism (for everyone) and mysticism (reserved for rare recipients of exceptional graces). However, the advent of spirituality in the Church, concomitant with that of culture in civilization, undermines this distinction. The signs of this are two popular successes, immediate and lasting, in counterpoint to the modernist crisis and the denunciation of the Concordat in 1905: theStory of a soul — that of “little Thérèse” (from Lisieux) —, published in 1898, only one year after death, and in 1921, just after the Great War, the first life of Charles de Foucauld, due to the novelist and academician René Bazin, which makes the reveler officer who has become a “hermit in the Sahara” another inspiring model of an intense personal relationship with Christ.
Asceticism and mysticism
Catholicism was thus, throughout the 20th century, more and more internally “lived” and a matter of private choice, while asceticism, in the first and broad sense of the term, was declared no longer sufficient. It is now used to express feelings and, at best, to maintain them. And if it does not lend itself to it, if anything is displeased in the Church, we dispense with these penalties. The trouble is that, if asceticism is no longer primary, it is not really mysticism that takes its place. Certainly, it is fortunately no longer the fear of hell that motivates attendance at exercises of piety. But love, legitimately recognized as central and decisive, is not lacking in ambiguities: it leads more, it seems, to an altruism seasoned with introspection than to the contemplation and sharing of the mystery of God glorified by his lowering.
The challenge of the 21st century could thus be to become aware that asceticism and mysticism are Christianly inseparable. The will does not turn towards God without having been inspired there by the Holy Spirit — but not always directly, because he also acts through a number of witnesses: in the family, the milieu, the Church… Asceticism therefore has a mystical spring. And mysticism is fundamentally ascetic, because participation in the divine life is not without obscurities and stripping, the Cross of Jesus being only the paroxysmal and liberating transposition within humanity of the total and trusting abandonment between the Eternal Son, his Father and the Spirit who unites them and unites them. If asceticism is for everyone, so is mysticism!
Beyond knowledge and feeling
All of this is not to say that it doesn’t matter what you feel (or not), but that there is much more going on than you know and experience in sacramental practice and all forms of prayer and prayer. sharing of spiritual goods. They are not means, but already anticipations, foretastes or, as Saint Paul says, “deposits” (2 Co 1, 22 and 5, 5) of the undeserved end. It is a spirituality foreign to smoky speculations as well as to vain affects. It not only animates a religion, but can also permeate all cultures and generate new civilizations. That’s why she has a future.
The advent of spirituality erases neither asceticism nor mysticism