Christ-Centered Catholic Spirituality: From Monastic to Mendicant Spirituality

The history of Christian spirituality is rather like a roller coaster, with continual ups and downs: renewal is followed by decline, as the human spirit inevitably falters and falls despite best efforts. It was not just Irish monks who, when they had attained what is called spiritual paternity, were sent out to convert the world; it was Benedictine monks, too, at least in the beginning. Remember that it was Pope Gregory the Great who, after seeing beautiful, young, flaxen-headed Anglo-Saxon slaves in the marketplace, said, “Non Angli sed angeli”—not Angles but angels.

It was his first encounter with young Angles that inspired him to send St. Augustine, later called St. Augustine of Canterbury, with a band of Benedictine monks to begin the conversion of England. Augustine became the first Archbishop of Canterbury in the year 597. Only two miles from where I live, there are the ruins of Nursling Abbey at the basin of Southampton Water. It was from this Abbey that St. Boniface, a Benedictine monk, set sail for the continent around the year 700, thence to Germany, where he converted so many of the German tribes that he is, to this day, the patron of Germany.

When monks who had attained spiritual paternity led renewal, all was well; but sadly, when their fervor faded or when monks who were spiritually unprepared for the task went out into the world, it was the world that converted them to its ways and its own standards of living the “good life.” So, by the eighth century, Europe was awash with wandering monks, many of whom were busily undoing, by their behavior, all that was done by their illustrious forebears. 

The situation was such a scandal that when Charlemagne was enthroned in A.D. 800, he ordered all monks back to their monasteries and decreed that, henceforth, all monasteries in his empire must accept and observe the rule of St. Benedict. Whereas the Irish monks were modelled on the eremitical life of St. Antony, the Benedictine monks modelled themselves on the way of life of the community monasticism of St. Pachomius of Egypt and on the erudite monasticism of St. Basil of Cappadocia, now in present day Turkey.

Charlemagne now insisted that the vow of stability should be taken by every monk, meaning that every monk must stay permanently in his monastery; so monasteries would no longer be able to provide Christendom with itinerant preachers as in the past. This did not apply to the Irish monks, as they were not in his empire. Cluniac, Cistercian, and Carthusian monks would help reinterpret and reform the monastic life in subsequent centuries. But they would do little for the laity who were increasingly starved of evangelical spirituality. 

If genuine and far-reaching renewal was necessary for the Church to lead her people back to her God-given spirituality, two things would be necessary. Firstly, Christ should be repositioned back into the center of Christian spirituality, so that people could once more come to know and love Him in His human nature and so be taken up into His divine nature, to contemplate the Father. Secondly, this new presentation of the old spirituality would then have to be taken into the secular world, to the ordinary people, by a new brand of religious who first practiced what they would preach to others. All this was about to start at the beginning of the 12th century.

Sometimes in human history you feel that drums should roll, cymbals clash, trumpets sound, and spotlights highlight a particularly important event or person, or both. Just such a time came in the year 1112. The place where this event was about to happen was at a newly-found Cistercian monastery at Citeaux in France.

The English Abbot Stephen Harding was on the verge of giving up the new venture to go back to the early Benedictine tradition in all its rigor and simplicity with the emphasis on daily manual labor in the fields, when there was a knock on the monastery door. When the door was opened, it was to reveal St. Bernard, a young nobleman of 23 years of age, along with 32 of his friends. Like the first apostles, they were drunk with spiritual fervor. But they were not yet ready to go out to the world to fill it with what filled them. They needed to enter into solitude for their charismatic enthusiasm to be tempered through purification in the mystic way.

They had been set alight by a great religious movement that was consuming medieval Europe. In 1095, Pope Urban II inaugurated the first Crusade. Less than 10 years later, pilgrims who had been to the Holy Land on pilgrimage came flooding back, inspired and animated with what they had seen. They saw where Jesus was born, where He grew up, where He preached, where He shared the Last Supper with His apostles. They also saw where He worked His miracles, raised the dead to life, where He was raised from the dead, and where He sent His Holy Spirit on the first Pentecost Day.

They had witnessed where both His human and His divine nature had saved and redeemed them in one God-sent, perfect, divine and human person. Once Jesus, in His loving and loveable human nature, was back center stage at the heart of Christianity, the faithful could come to love Him—and enter into Him and into His mystical body, thence through His divine nature to contemplate the Father in, with, and through Him.

At the beginning of this new age, St. Bernard was the first to follow his heart into the mystic way that would enable him to develop a new Christ-centered theology and mystical spirituality that would be the cornerstone of Christian spirituality for centuries to come. Only three years after he joined this new Cistercian reform, he was sent to found another monastery—at Clairvaux, in 1115—where he was Abbot until his death in 1153.

In his monumental study Christian Spirituality, Père Pourrat devotes nearly 100 pages to St. Bernard. In his view, it is St. Bernard above all who shaped the theology of the later Middle Ages—and also modern times—with his: “Emphasis above all on devotion to the mysteries of Our Lord’s Life—the infancy, the episodes of the Passion and the Crucifixion, and also his devotion to the Blessed Virgin.”

Although the theological and mystical writings of St. Bernard had an immediate effect on his monastic contemporaries, theologians, and open-minded bishops and their clergy, it was someone else who was destined to take this new Christ-centered spirituality to ordinary people. For St. Bernard and the new members of the Cistercian order, their spirituality was more than adequate to lead them to the heights of the mystic way; but their vow of stability still prevented them from taking their newfound Christ-centered spirituality to the world that was in such need.

That the renewal they were trying to bring about was necessary was beyond doubt. For the long and depressive spiritual emptiness of the Dark Ages had taken its toll on the moral fiber of a Church lacking the inner mystical life that was about to reanimate it. The text of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) that was now on the horizon, painted a gloomy picture of the woes of clerical irregularities that it was called to remedy. However, it was already decided that the many groups of evangelical men who had set themselves up to renew the Church were not fit for purpose. With the best will in the world, they had become “evangelical ranters” full of bile and vitriol for the clergy—who may well have deserved their invective, but it would never convert them; for only the humble can speak to the dissolute and the depraved with any hope of being heard. 

The man who would do what they failed to do was born 30 years after the death of St. Bernard. He not only fed off the fervor of others who had been to the Holy places but actually went there himself. His name was St. Francis of Assisi. 

Unlike St. Bernard, he was called to take the new spirituality to ordinary people like himself, founding a new religious order that enabled him to do this on a grand scale. Other mendicant orders began to flourish with the Franciscans, all trying in their own way to respond to the needs of a Christendom which had been sliding back into paganism. The Franciscans originally grew out of a lay movement, the Carmelites out of the eremitical life, and the Dominicans owed much to the monastic life they adapted for the sake of those spiritually languishing in the world. 

It was at the Fourth Lateran Council that these new Orders were encouraged to bring about the reform in the Church that was so long overdue, with the new spirituality developed by St. Bernard. These Orders were teeming with saintly men and women who are still household names today: St. Francis of Assisi, St. Anthony of Padua, St. Dominic, St. Clare, St. Margaret of Cortona, St. Angela of Foligno, and so many others canonized for their transparent and heroic holiness.

Perhaps it should be remembered that the great men whom we now called the Scholastics—like St. Albert the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, Blessed John Duns Scotus, and others—firstly were brought up on the new Christ-centered spirituality in their homes long before they turned to their “day job.” That is why they were such great saints and also produced so many prayers and spiritual treatises that still inspire us today.

When seeing what seemed to be a freedom denied them by their vow of stability, some members of monastic orders began to criticize the new orders, suggesting that their place should be in the monastery, not gadding about in the world. It was St. Thomas Aquinas who answered them with the words that I have already used to describe the essence of early Christian spirituality. “Our apostolate,” he insisted, “is to contemplate and then to share the fruits of contemplation with others.”

Inevitably, the return to meditation on the life of Jesus led not just monks and mendicants back to contemplation to receive the fruits of contemplation that were central to early Christian Spirituality. It led the ordinary faithful once more, for whom St. Francis of Assisi was the model.

His spirituality was simple because it was simply back to Gospel spirituality. First and above all else it is to come to know and love God by coming to know and love Jesus Christ, beginning with the meditation that, if pursued seriously and daily, always induces God to lead a person into contemplation. Why? Because the desire that is actuated in meditating on the life, death, and Resurrection of Christ, to be united with Him, can only be brought about in the present, not in the past.

In short, we cannot be united with Christ as He once was in the past but only as He is now in the present. And as, therefore, God created us to be united with Him through Jesus Christ, once that desire for union has been actuated in  meditation, and once our serious intent has been verified by our daily perseverance in meditation, then God always leads a person into contemplation.

It is in contemplation alone that we are united with Christ in the very act of contemplating God His Father. It is here that we receive from Him, through His Holy Spirit, what St. Thomas Aquinas calls the fruits of contemplation, without which we will attain nothing. As Christ said at the Last Supper, “Without me you have no power to do anything” (John 15:5). That is why the Jesuit mystic Père Lallemant said, “You can do more in a month with contemplation than in a lifetime without it.” And he was not talking about “Contemplation in action,” which is a phrase beloved of those who have little understanding of contemplation and the prayer that leads to contemplation.

The contemplation that leads to effective and successful apostolic endeavor, as seen in the early Church, the apostles, and in the lives of St. Francis of Assisi and the other mendicants, always begins in daily quality space and time given to the preparatory purifying contemplation that takes years rather than months to prepare them for action. “Contemplation in action” has become the “new age” clarion call for all who are not prepared, for whatever reason, to spend more time in prayer than in action to undergo the preparation and purification without which “the old man” in them still rules. Study the life of St. Francis and you will see that he, like other successful mendicants, spent far more time in prayer than in action; but when they acted, they acted with the power of the Divine love that possessed them, as it had possessed Christ before them.

When, toward the end of his life, St. Francis prayed that he could come to experience something of the suffering that Christ Himself suffered, and then something of the love that inspired Him to give His all for us, he was the first to receive the stigmata. But lest what he was about to receive should be misinterpreted, moments before he received the stigmata he received a revelation that cannot be overemphasized. It was that we can only be united with God through Love not by suffering.

The Dark Ages had put an erroneous emphasis on self-imposed suffering as the way to holiness, thanks to the misinterpretation of asceticism by some early monks and Arian ascetics that led them into errors of Manicheism, Neo-Platonism, and Semi-Pelagianism. Both Manicheism and Neo-Platonism taught that material things were at best ambivalent or at worst evil, so they should all be shunned, most particularly because they imprisoned the soul in the body. And so, as Christ could no longer help them as before, thanks to Arianism, they themselves were left alone to practice the requisite asceticism, both to free themselves from the influence of all created things and to free their soul from its imprisonment in their own evil bodies. And so, in addition to Manicheism and Neo-Platonism, they fell into Semi-Pelagianism.

In the lives of the great saints, you must distinguish between the gentle ascetism of those who give up anything that can prevent them from receiving the love of God in the prayer that leads to contemplation and the much later ascetism of a person when they begin to tangibly experience the Love of God. Then the ascetism that we must never try to follow or disaster will follow is actually the way that they are expressing their thanks for what God has done for them and for others through them. And further to this, it is how they also wish to make reparation for their own personal sins and for the sins of the whole of humanity.

Thanks to the Crusaders who opened the Holy Land to pilgrims once more, and to the contemplative spirituality that prevailed in the first centuries, the new Christ-centered spirituality would prevail for many centuries to come. Despite some “ups and downs,” religious orders and a glut of saintly apostles led to perhaps its finest expression in the 17th century. It can be called a Tridentine Spirituality because the Sacrifice of the Mass received a new and glorious emphasis because of the Protestants who had denied it. But now its position, as the heart and soul of any authentic Catholic spirituality, was not only secured but seen in a new way as the faithful began to see once more how the whole of Catholic spirituality revolves around the sacrifice first made on Calvary, made daily present in the Holy Mass.

The truth of the matter is that although there was more than enough depravity in high places thanks to the Renaissance Popes, particularly Alexander VI, on ground level the Franciscan reform movement inspired by St. Bernadine of Siena and the Dominican reform movement inspired by St. Catherine of Siena were still bearing fruit. The Council of Trent (1545-1563) was not primarily called to combat spiritual degeneration but Protestant heresies. It was preceded by great saints like St. Catherine of Genoa, St. Angela Merici, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Peter of Alcantara, St. Ignatius, St. Philip Neri, and so many others. While older orders were reformed, new orders—or rather congregations—were raised up to embody and disseminate the spirit and the teaching of the Council. 

Orders like the Jesuits, Barnabites, Theatines, Capuchins, Discalced Carmelites, and Oratorians, and a plethora of new activity-centered congregations of men and women were theologically and spiritually inspired and guided after the Council by such goliaths as St. Robert Bellarmine, St. Francis de Sales, St. Vincent de Paul, and St. John of the Cross. In the hands of such great leaders as these, for more than a hundred years after that Council, spirituality continued to thrive and prosper, surcharged from within by the profound mystical prayer that animated and inspired the Church since the great St. Bernard.

In his life’s work Enthusiasm, Msgr. Ronald Knox makes it quite clear:

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)

In his unique and masterly work The Spiritual Life: A Treatise on Ascetical and Mystical Life, Father Tanquerey admits that he is deeply indebted to the spirituality of the French school of the 17th century, in which mystical theology reached such an advanced stage of development. In addition, the printing press enabled spirituality to spread not only widely but deeply, too—to include the new literate laypeople who were becoming more and more numerous. The best example that I can give is the spread and the influence of the bestselling spiritual book of all time after the Bible—namely, The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis (d. 1471). I still have a copy of this work given to my grandmother in 1900 on her 21st birthday by an old school friend who was a Faithful Companion of Jesus! He was the best-known member of a new Christo-centric renewal moment in the “low countries” called the “Devotion Moderna,” led by Gerard Groote.

Perhaps the best and most detailed exposition of the mystical spirituality that blossomed in the 17th century can be found in The Religious History of Seventeenth Century France, by the renowned spiritual theologian Dr. Louis Cognet. During this century, the works of the two incomparable mystical writers and Doctors of the Church, St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, were made available to those pursuing an ever-deepening prayer life. No previous generation had such a privilege and such an indispensable, inimitable, and inspiring guide to the journey into and through contemplative prayer to union with God.

However, the clouds were beginning to gather. From small beginnings, a pernicious heresy was brewing that was going to do for the mystical life what Arianism did for the Christian life in earlier centuries. The heresy would be called Quietism. The leader of the movement was a Spanish secular priest based in Rome who promised “The Prayer of Quiet,” as described by St. Teresa of Avila in her masterpiece, The Interior Castle, to those who were not prepared to undergo the inner purification that would enable them to receive it. 

There was another heresy, too, that began to raise its ugly head, and that was, and for that matter still is, semi-Pelagianism—which would “blossom” into full blown “Pelagianism” in the 20th and 21st centuries by those who, having so refashioned their new “religion” on purely secular wisdom suddenly realized that they no longer needed God, for He was surplus to requirements. As Voltaire once put it, “God created man in His own image and likeness and man has returned the compliment.”

More on this topic must be said if we are to see and understand why it was put down so vigorously and how it resulted in the demise of true Catholic mystical spirituality—of which so few are aware—with the catastrophic consequences for the Church down to the present day, which we have all witnessed.