Combat, closeness, mission
Renaming the three ages of the interior life
Plato’s allegory of the cave (Republic Book VII, 514a-520a) vividly presents the three basic steps of any spiritual path that aims at positive transformation of oneself and the world. The protagonist of the allegory starts out among a crowd of people chained down in a dark cave, watching shadows of various objects projected by firelight on the opposite wall. He is set free, but faces considerable resistance in making his way up to the surface, especially as the sunlight begins to blind his weak eyes, long accustomed to darkness. After emerging from the cave, his eyes eventually adjust, and he is finally able to appreciate the vivid beauty of the natural world. This prepares him for the ultimate step of gazing upon the sun itself, achieving unmediated union with the source of all illumination. In Greek Platonism and Stoicism just as in Zen Buddhism, the spiritual life begins with a painful process of purification from the false delusions in which the mind and affections were formerly occupied. This ascetical exercise frees the mind for the second stage, in which it comes to correctly appreciate reality, and is able to act in accord with the deepest truth about oneself and the world. This appreciation includes the discovery of the sublime possibilities of growth of the human spirit, igniting the desire for direct union with the divine, the third and final stage of the path.
Origen of Alexandria, one of the first Christian theologians, attributed the discovery of this threefold path to the Biblical King Solomon, who expounded these steps under divine inspiration in the books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs, respectively. His articulation of the three elements became universally accepted in Christian spiritual writing. Initially named with terms borrowed from Greek philosophy — e.g., “ethics,” “physics” and “theology” for those inclined towards Aristotelian language — these dimensions eventually received the standardized titles of “purgative,” illuminative” and “unitive” stages in the Latin West. While Origen admitted that the Greek philosophers were aware of these three steps and strove to practice them, he was equally adamant that they could only be successfully pursued in cooperation with the free divine initiative mediated by Jesus of Nazareth. Despite the continuity of structure and terminology, this conviction gave each of the steps a very different content and character in Origen’s philosophy as compared to that of any of his Greek contemporaries.
In fact, these innovations were so radical as to eventually render the terminology itself inadequate. When St. Josemaría Escrivá composed his own youthful account of the Christian Way in the 1930’s — based on the experience of Christian life deeply embedded in his native Aragonese culture, and intensely felt in his own mystical contemplation — the three parts of the book did not fit comfortably into the traditional framework. This caused me considerable difficulty last year when beginning my seven-part commentary on this work here on this Substack, and I eventually had to accept the fact that the parts of the book were not going to match my pre-conceived structure. Now I see that St. Josemaría’s account is still continuous with Origen’s scheme, but that the full flowering of the novel elements over the course of the intervening centuries has made it almost unrecognizable from the perspective of ancient philosophy.
The theologians involved in planning the series of articles I am commenting on this year clearly realized this (though perhaps not so explicitly), and devised a new triad of terms that tracks the content of St. Josemaría’s triad more closely: combate, cercanía, misión — “combat, closeness, mission.” The series is organized around these three concepts, with five to seven articles fleshing out various aspects of each one, published once a month. In today’s post, I want to briefly explain how each of these terms builds on and modifies the corresponding member of the traditional triad, citing from the introductory article written by the project leader Fr. Carlos Ayxelà.
From ethics to combat
In Plato’s allegory, the first stage of the spiritual journey involves effort and sacrifice, but it would be hard to characterize it as a “combat.” We start out in the cave as an unavoidable corollary of our immersion in the unstable flux of the material world, and though spiritual maturity may be difficult to obtain, this is simply a fact of life, and not the result of any malicious opposition. This perspective makes the Gospels all the more surprising, when they present Jesus as someone who is already spiritually perfect by nature, the immediate personal presence of God on earth, but who still suffers opposition and hardship. His suffering is not a step towards union with God — since he already possesses that from the beginning — but comes from some other source. The Biblical text explains this in terms of a battle, the result of a cosmic rebellion against the Creator, which the Creator seeks to overcome through his own suffering and forgiveness rather than by a sheer act of his omnipotent will.
Ayxelà sketches this dimension of the Christian with a pair of Biblical citations, one summarizing the wisdom of the Hebrew tradition into which Jesus was born, and another spoken by Jesus himself:
“My son, if you come forward to serve the Lord, prepare yourself for trials. Set your heart right and be steadfast, and do not be hasty in time of calamity” (Sir 2:1-2). Trial, temptations, and struggle are inevitable in a world wounded by sin. “The kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force” (Mt 11:12).
This language of spiritual combat struck the Greek philosophical world as strange and even repulsive, especially to Platonists who affirmed the ultimate goodness of all of reality. For them, conflict and violence had to be relegated to the realm of illusion, and could not ultimately form part of the fabric of the spiritual life itself. But for us moderns, it is the ancient Platonic vision that seems strange and exotic (and for that reason, attractive to many people fed up with the pathologies of modernity). As Jordan Daniel Wood has recently pointed out (point number 5), the “woke” phenomenon is just the latest in a series of modern ideologies that take for granted the existence of an invisible malevolent enemy of cosmic proportions, and the need for an unflinching violent struggle in order to defeat it. While some contemporary Christian writers are quick to highlight the resonances between Christianity and Platonic or Buddhist monism to benefit from the attraction of its strangeness, St. Josemaría (and Ayxelà in this summary) seeks instead to reappropriate this essentially Christian element of modern culture, embracing “combat” unreservedly.
From physics to closeness
For Aristotle, as for all the great sages, the visible cosmos reflects, in a limited way, the characteristics of its divine Cause. His minute attention to the specific details of the rhythms of coming-to-be and passing-away in the biological world was ultimately a means for contemplating the Prime Mover, whose irresistible attraction is responsible for the whole hierarchy of cyclical motions of the cosmic order. The followers of Plotinus, in their integration of Plato with Aristotle, would remind their readers of the necessity of prior purification from reflex entanglement with this process in order to achieve this level of contemplation. In this, they agree with Origen and with many other independent wisdom traditions that “physics” — correct and detached apprehension of the true nature of visible reality — is the second of the three steps in the growth of the spiritual life.
But the way Jesus relates to God does not quite fit this pattern. He certainly sees the hand of his Father in the visible world, down to the specific details of the form and color of the wildflowers of Galilee (cf. Mt. 6:28-29). His knowledge of the Father, however, is not the fruit of a long and arduous study of nature, rising to higher and higher levels of abstraction. Rather, it is characterized by an intimate closeness analogous to that of a human child towards his own parents (cf. Mt. 11:25-27). In the Gospels, he is constantly seeking to initiate his followers into this same way of relating to God, precisely through his own affection, attention and tenderness as a human being living alongside them.
This sense of paternal closeness permeates the way St. Josemaría describes his own experience of God in the concrete realities of his daily life, as exemplified in the citation with which Ayxelà introduces the second of the three parts of the series:
“God is always near us. [...] He is there like a loving Father. He loves each one of us more than all the mothers in the world can love their children — helping us, inspiring us, blessing… and forgiving” (The Way, n. 267). God's closeness assures us that He hears us in prayer and at all times. He also shows it to us through our brothers and sisters in the faith, through friendship, spiritual accompaniment, and the sacraments… Christians always know themselves to be closely accompanied by God and by their brothers and sister; we are always at home.
As the second part of the excerpt indicates, the primary locus for this experience of closeness is the Church, as the continuation in history of Jesus’ own human presence: both in the various interpersonal relations among members of the Church (friendship, spiritual accompaniment) and through the liturgical actions of the whole Church in which Christ makes himself present in a still more direct and powerful way (the sacraments).
This primacy of human mediation, as the clearest expression of divine closeness, has often led to the neglect of God’s presence in other dimensions of reality. Christians can easily fall prey to the temptation of confining their dealings with God to the time spent at church or in religious functions, while their professional work and ordinary social life seems bereft of transcendent meaning. The hyper-accelerated and efficiency-driven context of contemporary Western culture makes it objectively difficult to overcome this siloing, even for people who desire a better integrated unity of life. This is the main problem that Opus Dei, the institution founded by St. Josemaría, aims to address, providing a concrete set of practices and an environment of spiritual fraternity that facilitate the encounter with God’s paternal closeness in and through every time, place and situation of modern life.
From theology to mission
The goal of every spiritual path is union with the divine, i.e., “holiness,” which in the Biblical sense of the word refers only to God and to what belongs entirely to God. Only the ultimate reality can provide a solid foundation for a life that transcends the dictates of immediate necessity and opens up to the full capacities of the human heart. Many spiritual traditions — including Platonism — also stress the duty of the one who has reached this goal to return, like the protagonist of the allegory of the cave, and help those who are still struggling in the shadows. But it is hard to understand how this duty relates to one’s own personal goal of divine union.
Jesus opens up an entirely new perspective on this question. His consciousness of intimate union with the Father is always bound up with his identity as “sent” by the Father. Those who attain union with God through assimilation to Jesus simultaneously come to share in his mission of salvation: “There is no way to separate interior life from apostolate,” St. Josemaría explains, “just as there is no way to separate Christ, the God-man, from his role as redeemer.” In his introduction, Ayxelà sketches the way of thinking that this Christian vision of holiness tends to inculcate:
The path to holiness is, therefore, not a solitary path, nor is it an individualistic project for self-salvation. Everything in Christian life speaks of relationship and family. The Lord, our brothers and sisters, our children, our parents, our friends, our colleagues... are the reason for our efforts and our victories. If it weren't for them, perhaps we would stop fighting. Perhaps we would give up, but we know that, just as we can count on their support, they count on us: they need us. “I am a mission on this earth; that is the reason why I am here in this world. We have to regard ourselves as sealed, even branded, by this mission of bringing light, blessing, enlivening, raising up, healing and freeing” (Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, n. 273). That's how the saints lived: for God and from God; for others and from others.
While the goal of holiness was much more intuitive for the Greeks (and probably for Eastern philosophies as well) than the notion of mission, in the modern West the situation is reversed. We automatically tend to search for our “mission” or “vocation” in life, and the younger generations easily become impatient with work that is insufficiently “meaningful,” that fails to contribute in an obvious way to the salvation of others from various forms of suffering or oppression. St. Josemaría locates this intuition within its original Christian framework, affirming the validity of this sense of mission, and presenting the path to holiness as its adequate foundation.
Not to abolish, but to fulfill (cf. Mt. 5:17)
Before concluding this brief recap of the “renaming” of the three steps of the spiritual path, I should make two caveats to avoid some easy misunderstandings.
The first is that combat, closeness and mission should not be considered as “replacements” for the traditional terminology of the purgative, illuminative and unitive ways. As we have glimpsed in these lines, St. Josemaría’s account of the threefold path is not a radical innovation, but is something already implicit in the Gospels, and reasonably explicit already in the way Origen describes the content of the three stages. For this reason, it can only be adequately understood in continuity with the whole preceding tradition of Christian spiritual theology. In fact, many of the pathologies that afflict modern society can be linked to an interpretation of these three concepts in dialectical opposition to their predecessors: the “combat” is exclusively against external oppressors, without demanding any internal purification; “closeness” is something exclusive to humans, purely internal and subjective, opposed to the tyrannical forces of metaphysics and laws of nature; the generosity of “mission” is opposed to the self-centered and escapist pursuit of mystical ecstasy. In St. Josemaría’s vision, by contrast, combat includes combat against our own disordered tendencies, closeness is experienced in careful attention to the given reality of each of God’s creatures, and the nature of the mission requires mysticism.
The second caveat is that these three “steps” should not be taken as strictly sequential, as if the one who has arrived at “closeness” has left “combat” behind for good. The mainstream of the Christian spiritual tradition has always maintained that all three dimensions — purgative, illuminative and unitive — are present in some way at every moment of one’s spiritual journey here on earth. This becomes especially clear with the new terminology, derived from reflection on the life of Jesus, for whom combat, closeness and mission were fully operative at every moment of his earthly existence. It still makes sense to refer to these elements as “stages” or “steps,” however, since they normally become especially salient in succession as one makes progress along the Way. At the beginning, the combat against deeply-rooted habits of behavior takes center stage, though sustained by experiences of closeness and motivated by a vocational consciousness. As these habits are overcome, it becomes easier to encounter God’s closeness, first in the Church, and then in more and more aspects of one’s work, family and social life. Finally, secure in God’s closeness, one arrives at a state of continuous union of one’s own will with the saving will of God, wanting in every situation what God wants, identified with his aims and his way of seeing, living as his agent in the world. As long as we are on earth, however, we are still subject to the attacks of demons and those who (perhaps unwittingly) serve them, just as Jesus allowed himself to be subject to temptation. The combat therefore continues even in the state of union or mission, while taking on a different tone and emphasis.