Camino (part 3)

The way of Joseph

In the last essay, we saw how Saint Josemaría Escrivá’s proposal for changing the world relies on the formation of almas de criterio: people filled with divine wisdom through their identification with Jesus Christ, who become points of reference for their whole sphere of professional work and social life. The first step in producing such an individual is the intervention of a father-figure, typified by Joseph of Nazareth, who shows the way from childhood to spiritual maturity. This spiritual paternity has always played a central role in Christian life, but was first theoretically analyzed only after the rise of monasticism at the end of the 3^rd century. Eastern Christianity has preserved this primitive way of practicing spiritual fatherhood with relatively little change up to the present day, as explained by Pope John Paul II in a letter to Eastern Catholics:

A monk's way is not generally marked by personal effort alone. He turns to a spiritual father to whom he abandons himself with filial trust, in the certainty that God's tender and demanding fatherhood is manifested in him. [...] It is not a question of renouncing one's own freedom, in order to be looked after by others. It is benefiting from the knowledge of the heart, which is a true charism, in order to be helped, gently and firmly, to find the way of truth. [...] He who is a father in the spirit, if he really is such — and the people of God have always shown their ability to recognize him — will not make others equal to himself, but will help them find the way to the Kingdom.¹

In the first section of Camino, Escrivá leads the reader down the same interior path described by the first Christian monks, showing (from his own paternal experience) how the same laws of the spirit apply to the life of a lawyer or engineer in 20th-century Spain. Maximus the Confessor’s clear and comprehensive synthesis of that path helps to illustrate this, although Escrivá never read Maximus and received no direct influence from his writings. The path is standardly divided into three stages, which Maximus beautifully describes in their mutual connection while interpreting three key words from a passage in Genesis (3:17-18):

“Ground” is […] the purification of the heart through praxis; “grass” is the knowledge of created things according to theoria physike; “bread” is the true mystagogy according to theologia.²

Maximus uses the same symbol of the “ground” employed by McLuhan as quoted in a footnote to the first essay. Here he emphasizes its character as a physical substrate for the spiritual life: it is through concrete actions taken in the physical world – praxis – that the ground of consciousness is prepared for the subsequent steps. From this ground, this purified mode of attention, there grows up the “grass” of true appreciation for the things perceived by the senses. Through this theoria physike (“natural contemplation”), the first step of gnosis, the mind sees through the surface of things to admire and cooperate with God’s original and ongoing action. Finally, the wheat is harvested by divine initiative and converted into bread, the bread that is offered to God as a pure sacrifice, and that gives life to the world. For Maximus and the tradition he follows, theologia is not an academic discipline, but rather the name for this final stage of experiential participation in the life of the Trinity, a life entirely animated by the Love of the Holy Spirit.

In other passages, Maximus links these three stages with three “laws.”³ And the number of chapters corresponding to each stage within the text of Camino turns out to correspond exactly to the relevant law. The stage of praxis, occupying the first 10 chapters of Camino, corresponds to the “written law” of the 10 commandments. Theoria physike takes up the next 7 chapters, echoing the 7 days of creation that give rise to the “natural law.” Finally, theologia is the theme of the last 2 chapters of this section, which deal explicitly with the 2 commandments of the “law of grace.” These symbols are sufficiently universal in the Christian tradition that Escrivá could plausibly have intended this correspondence without knowledge of Maximus, especially given his own love of numerology.

We can thus make the following outline of the first 19 chapters (keeping in mind that this is my own interpretation — there are no section headings other than individual chapter titles in the original, and Escrivá never used these Greek terms himself):

A. Praxis (Chapters 1-10)
1. Context: Character, Direction, Prayer
2. Apatheia: Holy Purity, Heart, Mortification, Penance
3. Implementation: Examination of Conscience, Resolutions, Scruples
B. Theoria physike (Chapters 11-17)
1. The third dimension: Presence of God, Supernatural Life, More about Interior Life
2. The danger: Lukewarmness
3. The modern contemplative: Study, Formation, The Plane of your Sanctity
C. Theologia (Chapters 18-19)
1. The first commandment: Love of God
2. The second is like it: Charity

This is only the tip of the iceberg of the resonances between this section and the Greek Fathers. There is a whole research program waiting to be developed that would harness Escrivá’s immediate, contemporary language to shed light on many themes of ancient Christian writing that are still understood only superficially. Here, I can only give a few suggestions of the lines of thought that have occurred to me while reading Camino alongside the writings of Maximus the Confessor, choosing one idea from each of the three “stages.”

Praxis: towards apatheia

Many modern readers find the first stage shocking when they begin to delve in to the Fathers. Maximus stands with a large ancient Christian consensus when he describes the goal as apatheia, a state in which pleasure and pain no longer determine the outcome of any decision.⁴ This seems too extreme, and to risk converting the Christian into some kind of cold, distant robot. Some would accuse the Fathers of importing too much Greek Stoicism into their presentation of the spiritual life, losing the human joy of living that pulses through the Old Testament.

Escrivá is just as radical as the Fathers in his presentation of the goal, with the central four chapters of the praxis section treating it directly. This core is framed by three introductory chapters that set the scene⁵ and three concluding chapters on the implementation of advice, making these four truly the heart of this decade. The first two of these are about overcoming pleasure as a motive force, both sexual pleasure specifically and pleasant attachments more broadly. But Escrivá constantly brings out the positive side of this struggle, its human beauty and attractiveness. To take one example, from the second of these chapters, on general detachment of the heart:

Detachment. —How much it costs!… — Who will grant me to have no more attachment than three nails nor more sensation in my flesh than the Cross!⁶           

The wish is clearly just as “extreme,” if not more so, than the most rigorous of the Fathers, but it is expressed as an ardent desire, flowing from a burning love for the crucified Jesus. This burst of passion could never be qualified as frigid; it clearly flows from the deepest recesses of a fully human personality. A careful reading of the Fathers shows that most of them, including Maximus, are thinking along the same lines, and would feel this line echo in their soul, even if their specific occasions for writing and their stylistic context do not always leave space for it to be expressed so clearly.

The same analysis applies to the other pair of chapters, on overcoming pain. The second of these starts with this startling litany:

Blessed be pain. —Loved be pain. —Sanctified be pain… Glorified be pain!⁷

Again, this is in full agreement with the notion of apatheia: this litany fully excludes the avoidance of pain as a reason for action. But it is just as passionate as the point on detachment. It is not about mere indifference, but rather embracing and loving whatever God sends or allows.

Theoria physike: the third dimension

Natural contemplation is perhaps just as difficult a concept for modern readers to internalize. Modernity is supposed to have “disenchanted” nature, emptying out its symbolic depths and reducing everything to its surface appearances. And those who do continue to seek out those depths find that the modern way of life makes them all but impossible to discover. They yearn for the agrarian societies of old, where man lived in close contact with the vitality of earth, and they cannot see how a fully human life can endure a world of screens and spreadsheets.

Escrivá begins his treatment of this idea with a blunt affirmation that the depths are still there, and with an invitation to keep pursuing them, even when no one else around you does so:

Most people have a flat vision, stuck to the earth, of two dimensions. —When you live a supernatural life, you will obtain from God the third dimension: height, and, with it, depth, weight and volume.⁸

He drives this point home with the chapters on “Study” and “Formation,” teaching that “An hour of study, for a modern apostle, is an hour of prayer.”⁹ These chapters specifically apply the invitation to the context of the modern workplace. Although it may be more difficult to discover the “third dimension” of your cubicle, Escrivá firmly believes that it is there waiting for you. The very fact that your profession exists, playing some role in the maintenance of human life, implies that it has this depth. The problem is a superficial understanding, doing things unthinkingly, failing to really grasp what the profession is and what it is for. Study, obtaining true expertise in your field, thus becomes the key to unlocking the deeper meaning. And because this meaning ultimately lies in God, study itself becomes dialogue, contact, prayer.

Theologia: human and divine love

We will look more closely at this final stage when we get to the third section of Camino, the one that we associated with Jesus himself in the structure of the Holy Family. But there is already a preview of this stage within this first section, through the explanation of the two commandments of love. Here too there is a widespread difficulty that Escrivá addresses head-on. Following the language of the New Testament (and the Old), the Fathers always place love for God at the center of the spiritual life. But for modern people, this seems to be an equivocal use of the word love. Can this really be the same thing, even at the level of analogy, as what a husband and wife feel for each other, or a mother for her child?

In continuity with both the Biblical and the philosophical tradition, the Greek Fathers feel the connection much more instinctively. For the philosophers, the eros for the divine is the defining feature of specifically human existence, and ever other desire is only a pale imitation of it. Escrivá is in full agreement with the Fathers here, and instead of trying to justify their intuition, he simply affirms it, inviting the reader to experience it: “There is no love greater than Love.”¹⁰

Conclusion: a divinized personality

The result of all this is a new kind of personality, as described in the last chapter of the “natural contemplation” section:

The “plane” of the holiness the Lord asks of us is determined by these three “points”: Holy intransigence, holy coercion and holy shamelessness.¹¹

Independence from pleasure and pain, a clear intuition of reality and a passionate love for God and neighbor combine to forge a character of unstoppable force. With mind and heart firmly rooted in God himself, this new man yields to no one, does not take “no” for an answer, and is afraid of nothing. He is Nietzsche’s Übermensch, but grounded in the ultimate Source of reality, cooperating with His designs for creation — able to elicit cooperation by directing people’s gaze upwards, rather than imposing his own will by violence or deceit.

But this all depended on the background of the Church: the matrix of practices and relations rooted in Jesus himself and animated by the Holy Spirit. Next time we will bring this structure itself into focus, along with the personal qualities required to strengthen and sustain it.

1. John Paul II, Orientalis Lumen (1995), n. 13.

2. Maximus the Confessor, Responses to Thalassios, Question 5: “Γῆ τοίνυν ἐστίν, καλῶς ἐσθιομένη, ἡ διὰ πράξεως τῆς καρδίας κάθαρσις, χόρτος δὲ ἡ κατὰ τὴν φυσικὴν θεωρίαν ἐπιστήμη τῶν γεγονότων, ἄρτος δὲ ἡ κατὰ τὴν θεολογίαν ἀληθὴς μυσταγωγία.”

3. For example, Responses to Thalassios, Question 39, interpreting the three days the crowd spent with Jesus in the deserted place before the multiplication of the loaves and fishes: “Καθ᾽ ἕτερον δὲ τρόπον, τοὺς τρεῖς γενικωτέρους νόμους αἱ τρεῖς ἡμέραι σημαίνουσι, τὸν γραπτόν φημι καὶ τὸν φυσικὸν καὶ τὸν πνευματικὸν ἤγουν τὸν τῆς χάριτος.” See also the end of Question 64, on the three days’ journey through the city of Nineveh.

4. cf. Responses to Thalassios, Question 63: “Διόπερ ὁ τῷ λόγῳ σοφῶς ἑπόμενος πρὸ τοῦ βεβιασμένου καὶ παρὰ γνώμην θανάτου θάνατον τῆς σαρκὸς ἑκουσίως καταψηφίζεται, τὸν πρὸς αἴσθησιν τῆς γνώμης παντελῆ ποιούμενος χωρισμόν,” (“…totally separating the inclination of the will from sensation.”)

5. These introductory chapters deserve their own commentary even on this first pass through the book. They place the whole section in a context of prayer, showing from the very beginning that the whole process is about opening a dialogue with God, and they underline the importance of face-to-face conversation with a spiritual father. This last point is particularly interesting, as the book itself points out its own insufficiency, in line with the classical understanding of the priority of oral exchange over the written word (as discussed in the Phaedrus of Plato, for example).

6. Camino 151: “Desasimiento. —¡Cómo cuesta!... ¡Quién me diera no tener más atadura que tres clavos ni más sensación en mi carne que la Cruz!”

7. Camino 208: “Bendito sea el dolor. —Amado sea el dolor. —Santificado sea el dolor... ¡Glorificado sea el dolor!”

8. Camino 279: “La gente tiene una visión plana, pegada a la tierra, de dos dimensiones. —Cuando vivas vida sobrenatural obtendrás de Dios la tercera dimensión: la altura, y, con ella, el relieve, el peso y el volumen.”

9. Camino 335: “Una hora de estudio, para un apóstol moderno, es una hora de oración.”

10. Camino 417: “¡No hay más amor que el Amor!”

11. Camino 387: “El plano de santidad que nos pide el Señor, está determinado por estos tres puntos: La santa intransigencia, la santa coacción y la santa desvergüenza.”