Deconstructing Discernment

At the end of 1981, I thought that I had been sacked by the general of the Dominicans Sisters, whose Retreat Center at Chingford, in London, I had run for twelve years. But, two years later, I discovered that I had, in fact, been sacked by God. While I had been encouraging the sisters with whom I worked to go to Rome to study traditional Dominican Spirituality at the Angelicum, another group had been encouraged to seek renewal at a Jesuit retreat center in Denver, Colorado. The renewal course in Denver taught how to combine the teaching of modern Depth Psychology with traditional Jesuit Spirituality to change oneself, the community to which you would return, and other religious communities throughout the world. 

Before returning to renew their community at Chingford, a group of Dominican Sisters came together to discern how best to accomplish the task before them. In the discernment process, they came to discern that I was the major obstacle to their plans. I must, therefore, be sacked. This decision was not theirs but God’s, and the letter from the General was just the instrument of His will. A renegade later told me that they knew that it was God’s will because of the feeling of peace they all received on making their decision.

A well-known contemporary Jesuit, in the highest position in the Church, who had himself been trained in this new hybrid spirituality, would have agreed with them. He, too, would have sacked me for encouraging Dominican Sisters to return to rigidity instead of embracing the new, modern, hybrid spirituality in which traditional Ignatian Spirituality was combined with the wisdom of the world—in this case, with the findings of modern Depth Psychology. This spirituality—and the discernment process that is at its heart—has an uncanny way of canonizing the prevailing ideas and opinions of those who take part in it. We can see this now, as it has been used to beatify the whole process called the Synod on Synodality, the new man-made method of changing the Church. 

The truth of the matter is that it is a secular method of arriving at the truth that is fraught with serious dangers. Spiritual truth is sought without the true wisdom that is only given to a person after receiving what St. Thomas Aquinas calls the fruits of contemplation in deep personal prayer. Nor is it sacralized by the use of perfunctory prayers, no matter how sincere or how disingenuous they might be, asking the Holy Spirit to oversee the whole process. 

Only the infused virtue of wisdom received in profound prayer can successfully suffuse and surcharge ordinary human wisdom with the wisdom of the Holy Spirit. This traditional means of seeking true wisdom was practiced by our first Christian forebears and the older monastic and mendicant orders before they were influenced by the Jesuits after Quietism. But, sadly, when “modernism” was first born at the Renaissance, so too was the humanism that turned to the wisdom of the world to seek “truth.” 

In order to understand the discernment process in the Exercises of St. Ignatius, let me begin by emphasizing that the devil does really exist and that this is the teaching of the Church. That he is seen to have attacked Christ is clear from Scripture, but that attack was only from the outside. It must be quite clear that the Evil One could not get inside Christ—neither when He was on earth nor in Heaven—which is good news for us. For although the devil is the ultimate personification of evil, he cannot enter into the glorified body of Christ. So, those who enter into His mystical body at baptism and are in a state of grace are safe from direct confrontation with the devil from within themselves. Therefore, when we are in a state of grace, although we may be assailed by powerful temptations, we are safe from direct confrontation with the Evil One—or “The Enemy,” as he is described in the Exercises. 

When I have spoken in the past about “the demons within,” I always make it clear that I am using the phrase metaphorically. I am, therefore, referring to the unruly passions and urges, the consequences of original sin that keep threatening to destroy us from what Freud would call the “id” deep down in our unconscious. I am not referring to demonic creatures, agents of the devil, that dwell within us like pernicious gremlins gleefully plotting to destroy us. 

In the Exercises, however, it seems that the active presence of “The Enemy,” who is, as St. Ignatius puts it, “known by his serpent’s tail and the bad end to which he leads us,” is to be taken literally, as are the good and bad angels, or good or evil spirits, to which he repeatedly refers (see Fr. David Fleming’s presentation of the Spiritual Exercises, p. 216). It gives rise to the simplistic imagery of the good angel standing on one shoulder whispering into your right ear, trying to get you to do good things, while a bad angel stands on the other shoulder, trying to seduce you into doing bad things.  

If such a presentation of the spiritual combat was helpful over four hundred years ago, I cannot help feeling that modern readers would find it far more helpful to be told the truth that more readily coincides with their experience. That is, that the evil that we do indeed comes from our fallen nature, as St. Paul experienced for himself without any reference to the indwelling presence of good or bad angels, to say nothing of “The Enemy” as a serpent with a perceivable tail. He writes, in Romans 7:14-20, 

I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the very things I hate…and so the thing behaving in that way is not myself, but sin living in me. When I act against my own will, then, it is not my true self doing it, but sin which lives in me.

In recent years, this discernment process has been taken out of the Exercises and presented as a program for spiritual advancement in its own right. Anyone who has been dazzled by the expertise of a sincere and competent presenter would be advised to read the rules for discernment in the Exercises for themselves. Then, see them in the context of the other teachings in the Exercises. They would see that even the greatest of presenters is doing no more than trying to modernize practices that would be better left to be studied by spiritual antiquarians to understand a specific expression of the Faith at a particular time in Church history when humanism was rampant and not yet fully secularized.  

The contemporary humanism that inspired them in the immediate aftermath of the Renaissance guaranteed that they are riddled with the semi-Pelagianism that always prevails when a spirituality places all the emphasis on personal endeavor to make themselves perfect, despite a perfunctory reference to the Holy Spirit. The relentless concentration on oneself, and on trying to discern one’s motives, inevitably leads to the scrupulosity that the Exercises are therefore forced to address, for they are the inevitable consequences of a spirituality that can so easily lead to self-centered spiritual monomania.

At the Last Supper, Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would come to fill the apostles and His future followers with His Wisdom so that they could continue the work of our redemption. He put it this way at the Last Supper: “I still have many things to say to you, but they would be too much for you now. But when the Spirit of Truth comes, he will lead you to the complete truth” (John 16:12-13). In 537, the greatest church in Christendom was built, in what was then called Constantinople, in honor of the Holy Spirit whom Christ had promised to send at the Last Supper to implement God’s plan in the first Christian centuries. Understandably, then, it was called Hagia Sophia—Holy Wisdom.

When, in about A.D. 48, fifteen or more years after the crucifixion, several serious questions that were dividing the early Christians had to be resolved, a gathering of the faithful was called together to settle the matters and to seek the help of the Holy Spirit promised by Christ. St. Peter presided, but other apostles were there too, including St. Paul. This conclave, which came to be called the Council of Jerusalem, was seen as the prototype and forerunner of the later ecumenical councils. Please notice that those involved had come not to take part in some sort of discernment process devised by human beings but, rather, in serious debate and discussion that was successful because deep and prolonged prayer had sufficiently purified their minds and hearts, making then porous to the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, whom Christ had promised would guide and support them in the years ahead.   

The fruitfulness and effectiveness of all later councils, conclaves, and synods depended on prolonged and serious arguments and debates of the participants who for many years had their minds, their reasons, and their hearts purified in profound contemplative prayer, as I have explained in all my most recent books. Their conclusions, therefore, would always be ultimately attributed to the Holy Spirit working through those who, through their prayerfulness, were at all times open to receive His wisdom. That is why, when announcing the results of their deliberations at the Council of Jerusalem, St. Peter uttered those famous words: “It has been decided by the Holy Spirit and ourselves” (Acts 15:28).

In early Catholic councils, conclaves, and synods, it is primarily the Holy Spirit who is at work; but His work depends on the collective quality of the holiness of those who are sufficiently open to receive Him. This is how God’s will is sought in the Catholic Church. The same means of seeking His Wisdom was copied by the monks in their monasteries and the mendicants in their priories and friaries through their chapters. It was only when later congregations, like the Jesuits, had rejected mystical contemplative prayer after the Renaissance, and therefore the purification that would make the working of their minds and hearts both sensitive and open to the Holy Spirit, that they had to devise man-made methods and techniques to discover—or in their words “discern”—the truth to which only the Holy Spirit can lead people. 

That other priests and religious have all but forgotten the profound purifying prayer that can open them more readily to the Holy Spirit has prevented them from seeing clearly, and so opposing, a semi-Pelagian means and method of seeking true wisdom. True, God-given wisdom is only fully open to those who have become poor in spirit and humble and pure of heart, in the purification that only comes through encountering He who is mighty, working in them in profound contemplative prayer.  

When anthropocentric spiritualities predominate, any sort of discernment process, at any level, is fraught with danger because it can so easily be taken over by the self-serving ego within. This means that at the highest level, Synod on Synodality, for instance, is a means of government in which pre-decided decisions are ratified by carefully chosen sycophants in such a way that the faithful are deceived into believing that they are the work of the Holy Spirit. 

One of the most frightening and sinister features of this process is that when the autocrat comes to the conclusions that he has already decided before the discernment process began, he believes that his conclusions are “of God.” When this happens, woe betide anyone who tries to argue with or stand against him; because, like Cromwell before him, he believes that his decisions have been ratified, if not inspired, by God. Anyone, therefore, who stands against him is being inspired by the devil.