Searching for God # 107

 From the last post in this series:

spiritual exegesis of the Bible, virginity, monasticism, and the hagiographic ideal….these four topics follow from the last post in this series. Brief introductions to each of these topics follow here, plus an introduction to Origen,  Augustine and spiritual disciplines of ‘reading for holiness, lectio divina, and ‘the pure gold of silence’.

Spiritual Exegesis of Scripture

Even in those first centuries, ‘the fathers of the church were concerned when they interpreted Scripture to uncover a meaning that lay hidden beneath the more obvious literal teaching…The history of the spiritual interpretation of Scripture—sometimes referred to an allegorization—is a complex one. Its first major proponent was Origen, who found three levels of meaning in Scripture-- literal, ‘psychic,’ and spiritual—and set down rules for when a particular passage was not be interpreted in one way rather than another…..

John Cassian, in the early fifth century, distinguished among three different ‘spiritual’ levels of meaning in addition to the literal one: the tropological, the allegorical, and the anagogical. The tropological level carried the moral sense or meaning of the passage, the allegorical pointed to a deeper mystery, and the anagogical raised the mind to heaven…..(A)llegorizers (of the Old Testament)…generally brought to light…simply the mystery of Christ and the Church. They redeemed the Song of Songs for Christian readership, for example, by seeing in the bridegroom an image of Christ and in the bride an image of the Church or the Christian soul. They saw baptism in the Flood, the Eucharist in the manna in the desert, the Trinity in Abraham’s visitors at Mamre, and numerous other Christian truths scattered throughout the Old Testament. Mass and O’Donnell, Spiritual Traditions for the Contemporary Church, p. 35-36)

Virginity

Virgins were exceedingly rare in both Judaism and pagan religions, and such virginity as existed in paganism (of which the vestal virgins are the most famous example) was, in any event, not a lifelong commitment. By contrast, in Christianity virginity was understood to be lifelong and enjoyed wide favor. Virginity was a state in many ways similar to that or martyrdom, with the virgin being explicitly compared to the martyr…The virgin, like the martyr, had an enviably close relationship to Christ. Although either men or women could be virgins—and it is the case that virgins were first spoken of in the masculine gender in the writings of the Fathers—virginity was early on given feminine characteristics. Whether intentionally or not, this allowed for the image of the virgin as the bride of Christ, with its concomitant notions of fidelity and even eroticism, borrowed from the language of the Song of Songs. As the bride of Christ, the virgin symbolized the Church, which was itself virgin and bride. (Ibid, 0. 36)

Monasticism

Monasticism, after all, implied virginity, and the monk’s model, like the virgin’s was martyrdom….(T)he beginnings of monasticism, as we know it in the late third and early fourth centuries in Egypt. Correspond with the discovery of the desert as a place of spiritual retreat. From then on, the history of monasticism and of monastic spirituality is inextricably linked with at least the idea of the desert, if not the reality of it. (Ibid, p. 38)

The Hagiographic Ideal

By this is meant the model of sanctity or holiness proposed by the ancient writers when they portray the lives of the saints…..(T)he saint is close to God. The proximity to the Divine comes through prayer (often characterized as constant) through divine visitations, and through possessing the Spirit of Christ. Intimacy with God is manifested by miraculous powers—sometimes exercised in the most improbable ways, as when Martin stops in mid-air a pine tree about to fall on him. The cultivation of such intimacy demands not only the more usual ascetical practices, such as fasting, but also extended periods of seclusion… Among the saints’ most characteristic virtues are humility, charity, even toward enemies, steadfastness in the face of demonic attack, absolute single-mindedness about divine matters, a precocious maturity and discretion, and a burning zeal for the faith, whether against heretics or pagans…..The saint, as bearers of the Divine, is transparent to God. The elements of the marvelous, the improbable feats of asceticism and deeds of love, are meant to stretch the imagination beyond the particulate martyr or saint to the transcendent God. (Ibid, p. 38-39)

Two figures that stand out in the history of the early church, Origen and Augustine, are singled out by Mass and O’Donnell, for additional explication.

The spirituality of Origen (ca. 185-ca.254)…..is marked by the absolute and explicit primacy of the immaterial and invisible over the visible and material, with the consequent tendency to demean the body. There is for him a whole interior and immaterial world corresponding to the exterior one, especially in the realm of the anthropological, where we may speak of both an inner and outer self, each with itw own faculties. To Origan we own the famous idea of the five interior senses that mirror those of the body. His spiritualizing proclivity leads him to emphasize the invisible word over the visible sacraments and to see the sacraments in terms of the Word who is the second person of the Trinity. (Ibid, p. 39)

Augustine (354-430) is perhaps best known as the author of The Confessions, a spiritual autobiography unprecedented in its own time and unmatched in its genre to this day. In it Augustine establishes, with a sure grasp of  both psychology and theology, the pattern of a conversion to Christianity, with its gradual progress, its fits and starts, and its culmination in the discovery not only of God but of the true self as well. God and the soul, he had remarked, in an earlier treatise, were the only things worth knowing….He isolates pride as the chief of the vices and, as a result, lays great emphasis on humility. Augustine not only is an absolutist with regard to truth, having written two treatises that condemn lying of any sort whatever, but also discovers in truth its affective element, thus removing it from the solely intellectual sphere….Of all the Fathers, Augustine is the most unambiguous about grace and the necessity of grace for accomplishing anything good at all is a theme that recurs throughout his writings, especially in those directed against the Pelagians. The Pelagian heresy, which put the accomplishment of anything good well within human grasp and radically undervalued the role of grace, relied on ascetical practices to achieve what for Augustine, could ultimately only be brought about by a divine gift: grace…..Finally Augustine is the one chiefly responsible for bequeathing to Western Christianity the language with which it customarily expresses mystical experience, that is, that of the soul’s interior ascent to God. (Ibid, p. 40-41)

Part One of this text follows this section on the spirituality of the Early Church, with a practicum in ‘reading for holiness’ (lectio Divina), Monastic Life and a Practicum entitled, The Pure Gold of Silence. Next the authors write about Mendicant Spirituality with a practicum entitled Poverty and Prayer.

On Lectio Divina, they write:

In actual practice lectio is very simple: One finds some private place and begins repeating a text, either taking it from a printed text or remembering it from the liturgy. Let us suppose that the minister has preached on Psalm 23 (‘The Lord is My Shepherd; I shall not want’), and it strikes a chord. We begin to think about it. Ideally we would find a quiet corner and begin actually to ‘mumble’ the text. (Chapter 48 of his famous Rule, St. Benedict insists that the monks not do their lectio in the dormitory, because they could be heard and might disturb those trying to rest.) While mumbling the phrase we would ‘ruminate’ on—ponder it, rest in  it…When in the midst of repeating ‘The Lord is my shepherd’ other thoughts creep in –planning the day, remembering to pick up the dry cleaning—what should we do? Traditional practice says: Go back to the Word, read on a bit further. Use the Word of God as your safeguard, your guide. Don’t fight the Devil; don’t fight yourself. That is God’s business. The only tool Jesus had in the desert was the Word of God—what he had learnt ‘by heart’—and prayer. Calmly, insistently, we must ‘read’ on, and eventually, we will be led into discourse with the Divine. Cone properly, lectio divina is a form of reading that leads to prayer. (Ibid p. 47)

Introducing The Pure Gold of Silence, Mass and O’Donnell write:

Silence is hard. But every spiritual discipline, East or West, modern or traditional, advocates prolonged periods of silence as part of its spiritual training. For example, it was said of one of the Desert Fathers, the fourth-and fifth-century monks who lived in the deserts of Egypt and Palestine, that he kept a rock in his mouth for three years so that he might learn to be silent. For people like ourselves, who are immersed in the daily whirr and hum of the world, this is a radical idea….What is silence? Why is it so important? And why is it so hard? Silence is a complex and multifaceted spiritual reality. First of all, we can say that it is an ascetical function: it is an exercise in self-discipline. We are not used to silence. Every moment of our waking day is filled with sounds and noises, and when there isa moment of quiet, we feel uncomfortable…….(Ibid. p. 73)

In silence, we begin to listen, many for the first time, to who we really are as human beings, not who we wish we were. As we listen to our own  hearts, then, we can communicate our true selves. Initially, it may be a message of anger or pain; however,, it is the beginning of a real self-revelation. And what is prayer is not such a deep communication with God. Without silence there is no true self-awareness or communication. Without silence, there is no prayer. (Ibid, p.75)