A Council Without a Soul

If you have no spirituality, you have no soul. Let me explain why the Second Vatican Council came to have no soul. It involves going back to the Early Church and a whistle-stop tour of the history of Catholic spirituality. 

Almost everyone knows about the heresy of Arianism that tore the Church apart in the fourth century. Like me, they still wonder at how almost 90 percent of the Church denied that Christ was God and at how quickly it was defeated. In the days before mass media, all the Church could do was keep chanting the battle cry, “Christ is God. Christ is God,” until the war was won.

However, all wars are won at a price, and the price of victory against Arianism was that the divinity of Christ was so emphasized that His humanity no longer received the same emphasis that it received in the Early Church. It was by meditating on the Love of God, as embodied in Christ’s humanity, that the faithful had been led on and into contemplating Him as He is in Himself, in His Son, Risen and Glorified. The Dark Ages became ever darker for Christians once they had been denied the meditation on the humanity of Christ that leads to contemplation, although the spirituality lost to them continued in the monasteries. 

But after the Crusaders had taken back the Holy Places in 1099, the pilgrims who returned home reignited the love of Christ’s humanity, and the contemplation that was the heart and soul of early Christian spirituality returned once more. Thanks to St. Bernard who brought it back to intellectuals and St. Francis of Assisi who brought it back to the faithful, a new era of profound Mystical Theology was inaugurated that lasted until the end of the seventeenth century when, according to Msgr. Ronald Knox and many other spiritual historians, it reached its zenith. In his book Enthusiasm, he puts it this way:

The seventeenth century was a century of mystics. The doctrine of the interior life was far better publicized, developed in far greater detail than it had ever been in late-medieval Germany or late-medieval England. Bremond, in his Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France, has traced unforgettably the progress of that movement in France. But Spain too, the country of St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross, had her mystics; Italy also had her mystics who flourished under the aegis of the Vatican. Even the exiled Church in England produced in Father Baker’s Sancta Sophia a classic of the interior life. (Chapter XI)

Then, quite out of the blue, almost as quickly as Arianism had destroyed early Christian spirituality, a new heresy called Quietism destroyed the Catholic Mystical Theology that had prevailed for over six centuries thanks originally to St. Bernard and to the new mendicant orders who had made it their own. It was not just that the faithful no longer enjoyed the intimate relationship with God that they had before in contemplative prayer, but they no longer received what St. Thomas Aquinas had called the fruits of contemplation—namely, the infused virtues and the fruits and gifts of the Holy Spirit that had enable their earliest ancestors to transform a pagan empire into a Christian empire in such a short time.  

Molinos, the founder of Quietism, was a Spanish priest who resided in Rome. He promised his followers that he could show them how to attain what St. Teresa of Avila called the “Prayer of Quiet,” as she described it in her masterwork The Interior Castle, without having to undergo the purification described by St. John of the Cross in his book The Dark Night of the Soul. All they had to do in the time set aside for prayer was nothing. They did not even need to try to raise their hearts and minds to God; nor did they need to do anything to try to turn away from distractions or temptations.  

His heretical doctrine involved leading the faithful back into Protestantism while simultaneously leading them into gross sexual sins for which he was condemned in 1687, as you can read in Msgr. Knox’s Enthusiasm. In order to ensure that this heresy was instantly and permanently crushed, anti-mystical witch hunts were inaugurated that not only achieved their objective but which threw out the baby with the bathwater. 

Not only contemplative prayer itself but all other forms of prayer, like meditation that could lead to contemplation, were condemned in the immediate aftermath of Molinos’ condemnation and down to the present day. Without the contemplative prayer where divine loving is practiced, sometimes in darkness sometimes in light, union with God and the spirituality that follows from His divine indwelling becomes impossible. What was once a profound contemplative spirituality became little more than what the French Spiritual Theologian Louis Cognet called a “Devout Humanism.” In his monumental History of the Church, Msgr. Philip Hughes put it this way:

The most mischievous feature of Quietism was the suspicion that it threw on the contemplative life as a whole. At the moment when, more than at any other, the Church needed the strength that only the life of contemplation can give, it was the tragedy of history that this life shrank to very small proportions, and religion, even for holy souls, too often took on the appearance of being no more than a divinely aided effort towards moral perfection.

Although the rather dramatic destruction of authentic Mystical Theology was short-lived—so short-lived that nobody seems to know it ever happened—its legacy, both inside and outside of religious life, lived on in subsequent centuries down to the Second Vatican Council, affecting all who took part in it. With one or two possible exceptions, I have been unable to find any of the participants who were untouched by the anti-mystical ethos that prevailed in the several hundred years since Quietism was condemned.  With one or two possible exceptions, I have been unable to find any of the [council] participants who were untouched by the anti-mystical ethos that prevailed in the several hundred years since Quietism was condemned. Tweet This

Three names have been mentioned since my last article to question my assertion: Fr. Réginald Marie Garrigou-Lagrange O.P.; Fr. Jordan Aumann O.P., his successor at the Angelicum; and Fr. Louis Bouyer. Fr. Lagrange, who insisted that all are called to contemplation and who must be one of the most-praised and least-read advocates of contemplative spirituality, died before the Second Vatican Council ended. 

When I was invited to lecture on mystical prayer in Rome by the Dominicans on their renewal course, I asked why Fr. Jordan Aumann, O.P., had not been asked. I was told that he was asked but declined, as he said he only dealt with the subject from a theoretical and a historical point of view and not from a pastoral point of view. 

When studying Thomism in the 1950s, I read virtually all the works of Louis Bouyer because I was told that if I wanted to understand what was then called the New Biblical Theology it would be best to master one theologian who epitomized this movement and then to branch out to others. 

I still have a deep respect for my first mentor, but his treatment of Mystical Theology is that of an academic, not a practitioner. This can be seen most clearly in his History of Christian Spirituality in general and in his treatment of the Pseudo-Dionysius in particular. Because a person uses words like mystical and contemplation it does not mean that they are practical mystical theologians, and this means they make big and misleading mistakes. Time will only allow me to give you one example of what I mean. 

Over a hundred years ago, Dom Cuthbert Butler wrote his masterwork titled Western Mysticism. Read it if only for the sublime quotations from St. Augustine, St. Gregory the Great, and St. Bernard. But finally, read what he says at the end of the book because it sums up a point I want to make about most writers on Mystical Theology since Quietism.

Dom Cuthbert Butler has the humility to admit that he is not a practitioner, whereas others do not. In his Epilogue he writes: 

To prevent misconceptions, I say quite simply that I have never had any mystical experiences myself, never had anything that could have been called an experimental perception of God or his presence. The first four Mansions of St. Teresa’s Interior Castle will always be of practical use to those endeavouring to lead a spiritual life, but the last three Mansions along with the latest and the most mystical treatises of St. John of the Cross, and a host of other such writings, would have to be classed in our libraries as outworn ideas of a bygone age, or at best as religious poetry.

In a long life as a travelling lecturer and writer on Mystical Theology and a retreat master, I have only found one or two exceptions—who have always been seen by their peers as spiritual oddities. What was once seen as the way for all in the early Church, in imitation of Christ, is now only seen as an extraordinary way for a few exceptional souls who find themselves shunned by their contemporaries; for they have been led to believe that “mysticism begins in mist and ends in schism.”

No wonder there was no spirituality taught at the Second Vatican Council. Instead, we were given not a spirituality but the liturgical expression of the spirituality practiced by our early forebears at the dawn of Christianity. 

It was the liturgical expression of the profound mystical spirituality that Christ called “The New Worship in Spirit and in Truth” that He first lived and practiced for Himself before bequeathing it to the Early Church, as the only true spirituality for His disciples until He comes again in glory. No mention is made of this spirituality at the Second Vatican Council because, in the wake of Quietism, it had been long since forgotten. Nor is it detailed in any conciliar document, as the practical prequel to the document on the liturgy, that is spiritually lifeless without it. 

Sadly, the Externalism that Christ came to supersede in the Jewish religion has now returned to bedevil His own disciples in the most recent centuries. Sadly, whenever two or three of His disciples are gathered together today, it is not so much to pray, or to discuss the spirituality that Christ gave us, but to discuss their liturgical preferences. They seem blind to the fact that without the “divine loving” learned in the contemplative prayer that Christ practiced daily as an example to the disciples who would follow Him, they are falling back into the formalism that Christ came to replace with a spirituality that looked not to the outside but to the inside of the cup. As this profound Gospel spirituality was never detailed before the Council, during the Council, or after the Council, it would seem that we are doomed to keep living the formalism to which we have become so accustomed that we think it is the real thing. 

We have all been living for too long in a contemporary version of Plato’s famous cave, blind to the truth and looking at only the shadows of the truth instead. Prophets are even now arising, who, through deep contemplative prayer, have been able to see the truth once more. Please listen to them; and remember what, in their blindness, Plato’s cave dwellers did to Socrates, and to Christ who succeeded him with the fullness of the Truth.