church history to the reformation ch506 ormation ef o the ... · a concern to virtually all of the...

Church History to the Reformation

Transcript - CH506 Church History to the Reformation © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 19 of 24CH506

Medieval Spirituality

Church History to the Reformation

Lecture nineteen—Medieval Spirituality. Greetings once again in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Let me invite you to join me in prayer once again as we begin. Let us pray. Eternal God, we come to you in our need asking that you might meet with us and guide us by your Spirit. For we pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.

Christian spirituality, like Christian theology itself, is rooted firmly in the Bible. The Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments were the very foundation of faith and life for the early Christian communities, and they continue to serve that purpose throughout the Middle Ages as well. Christians have always been a people of the Book.

We have had occasion in an earlier lecture, of course, to explore the formation of that biblical canon. We now, however, need to turn our attention to the two major approaches to interpreting that canon which developed early in the church and which came to form the foundation upon which our understanding of Medieval spirituality must be built. These two approaches—or exegetical methods—might be called the Literal Approach on the one side (developed largely in Antioch and Asia Minor) and the Allegorical Approach on the other (developed largely in Alexandria and Egypt). These dominated the understanding of the Bible right down to the time of the Protestant Reformation. Let’s look together at these two for a moment.

First, the Allegorical Approach, which is often called Alexandrian Exegesis. This approach was developed in the mid-second century. Alexandria, of course, was a cosmopolitan city in the northeastern part of Africa. It was a place where Hellenistic culture had reached a high level of development. It was also the home of Philo the Jew who lived from 20 BC to about 50 AD. Philo was one of the most influential Old Testament exegetes of all time. He had, in fact, developed a method of allegorical exegesis, which he developed for the purpose of demonstrating the compatibility between the

Garth M. Rosell, PhD Experience: Professor of Church History

and Director Emeritus, Ockenga Institute at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary



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Old Testament Hebrew Scriptures and Platonic Philosophy in which he was involved.

Philo’s allegorical method formed the foundation for the Christian Exegetical School which emerged in Alexandria. The first major scholar of that school is named Clement of Alexandria. His dates are 150-215 AD. He was a great Christian intellectual. He adapted Philo for Christian use, seeking to unlock the Christian symbolism which he felt was resonate in the Old Testament. Clement’s greatest student—and perhaps the most formidable exegete of antiquity—was Origen, whose dates are 185-254 AD. Origen developed the Theory of Biblical Interpretation which dominated the church and its work with the Scriptures right down to the high Middle Ages. In addition, he produced an enormous corpus of writings, far beyond almost anyone else of his day including an extensive set of biblical commentaries. His Hexapla Biblia, which he produced about 240 AD, is a six-column presentation of Hebrew and Greek texts, the comparison of some of the ancient versions of Scripture, this forming one of the fundamental foundations of all biblical studies for his period and thereafter. You can find the writings of Origen, as well as the writings of Clement, his teacher, as a part of that marvelous set of Ante-Nicene Fathers, which I’ve mentioned before published by Eerdmans. If you look at Volumes 4 and 10, you will find Origen’s work. If you look at Volume 2, you’ll find Clement’s work, and some of you may want to dig those out of your libraries to read more fully.

In his writing On First Principles, Book 4, Origen developed his famous three-fold sense of Scripture. This was the ancestor of the great four-fold sense so common throughout all of the Middle Ages. That basic principle you’ll find in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume 4, beginning at page 349, and you may want to dig that out and read through the fuller account of what I’ll schematize for you briefly here. Essentially what Origen was calling for is attention to three senses of Scripture when one does interpretation. The first sense is the literal sense, focusing on the historical meaning of the passage. This is the most obvious immediate sense of what that text is about. Secondly, there is the typological sense. This relates to moral applications for the individuals not only of that time, but of our own. The third sense is the spiritual sense. What do you find in that text which is a foreshadowing of the new covenant back in the old covenant? For Origen, then, biblical interpretation was not complete until one had searched the literal sense, the typological sense, and the spiritual sense of the text. I’ll come back to that in just a bit.



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Origen had a variety of very notable successors there in Alexandria at that particular school—Dionysius, Athanasius, Didymus the Blind, and Cyril himself. All of them were worthy successors. Probably no one, even the great Athanasius and the great Cyril surpassed Origen, however, in his attention to the text and the kind of pathway that he led us upon for biblical interpretation through the Middle Ages.

The Antiochene School developed largely as a reaction to what they felt were excesses in this Alexandrian School. This developed in the late third century, founded by Lucian of Samosata who died in 312. This was established primarily in a theoretical way, however, by his student, Diodorus of Tarsus, who died in 392. This school was perhaps made must famous by two great students of that school—Theodore of Mopsuestia; his dates are 350-428; and the great preacher John Chrysostom, whose dates are 347-407. We’ve mentioned John Chrysostom, of course, before in connection with the powerful preaching, perhaps the greatest preacher of antiquity. The last great figure in this school was Theodoret of Cyrus, whose dates are 390-458. The emphasis of the Antiochene School was upon the literal meaning of the text; that is, its historical sense. They were also concerned, of course, with what it actually meant, and this grew out of a major problem which was a concern to virtually all of the early Christians. They were using the Old Testament for their readings, for their teaching, and their preaching. But they had come to new life and faith through the work of Jesus Christ. Since Jesus isn’t mentioned by name in the Old Testament, but they were deeply committed to Christ as the center of their faith, how then did they interpret the Scripture (the Old Testament) as Christians? This is what all of the Christian exegetes were seeking to do. They then needed to go beyond the specific literal meaning to pick up on those great Messianic meanings and, ultimately, the great Christian interpretations which they felt should surround our understanding of the Old Testament.

In response to this, the folks in Antioch developed the hermeneutical principle called Theoria, which attributed to the biblical writers a simultaneous perception of both the actual historical events which are being described and the future events which these foreshadow. The starting point for them was always the historical or literal meaning of the text, but it was never enough to remain there. They had to move beyond into basic Christian meanings. In this sense, then, Alexandria and Antioch were perhaps closer to each other than they even imagined. Both



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of them were clearly concerned about the literal or historical meaning of the text. But also they both wanted to move on to spiritual or Christian meanings to those Old Testament passages in particular.

Alexandria, perhaps, emphasized the Allegorical Method more strongly. But both schools were very interested in moving beyond the historical into the spiritual meaning, so that Medieval exegesis becomes preoccupied with that spiritual sense of the text. We see that in the blending of those two schools by the great biblical exegete, Jerome (whose dates are 340-420) perhaps the most accomplished biblical scholar in the West. In fact, his Volgate, his Latin translation of the Scriptures, became the very standard biblical text in the Western Church, having been produced at the request of Pope Damasus. The work was started about 382 AD.

The Alexandria exegesis was carried on in the West primarily by Ambrose of Milan and the great Augustine of Hippo, with whom we’ve become familiar. We see in Augustine, for example, his approach to Scripture in the Doctrina Christiana, his writing on Christian doctrine. Augustine always started with the literal sense of the text, but believed that all Scripture also had a spiritual sense, all Scripture had that sense. And it was the true goal of interpretation to move from the literal to that spiritual sense of the text. You see this exhibited beautifully in his discourses on the Psalms in which he moves quickly from the historical situation of the Psalm writers into those spiritual meanings, particularly as they relate to prayer. In fact, his discourses on the Psalms became one of the great prayer manuals for the whole of the Middle Ages. This writing on Christian doctrine of Augustine was actually designed to help pastors to study and preach Scripture. It was built on the basic principle, as Augustine put it, that the New Testament is hidden in the Old and the Old is enlightened through the New, a nice principle even of our day.

The Golden Age, then, of Patristic exegesis came to a close with Cyril of Alexandria who died in 444 AD with the linking together then of major strands of the Antiochene School and the Alexandrian School—with perhaps Alexandria holding the dominant edge throughout the Middle Ages. Exegetical work from the fifth through the eleventh centuries, from the fall of Rome to the rise of the great cathedral schools, centered almost exclusively on the monasteries. We know already about Monastic life where prayer, study, work all went on regularly. Part of that, of course, was the important prayerful study of the Scriptures



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in which the monks were involved. Monks spent, many of them, hours of every day in this activity. What was called Lectio Divina. It was founded upon the four-fold interpretation which John Cassian had developed out the work (remember the three-fold interpretation that had been done by Origen), but John Cassian suggested in his Writing Conferences of the Fathers, which is the foundational writing for this.

What he called upon exegetes to do is to seek the four senses of Scripture—the literal sense; that is, the historical meaning. The allegorical sense, what is the theological meaning of the text. The moral sense, how does it apply to Christian practice, and the analogical sense—what is the eschatological fulfillment to which that text points? Let me give you an example. If you take the simple references in the Old Testament to Jerusalem, which seems fairly straightforward, one can deal with those first in literal sense as a city—recognized, understood, pictured in the mind, but in an allegorical sense, Jerusalem characterized the church and it was often used a symbol of the church. In a moral sense Jerusalem came to focus on the soul and the development of the soul as that spiritual reality. And in an analogical sense, Jerusalem pointed to the heavenly city, that great hope of the future when we are together with God in Christ. This is often called spiritual exegesis, especially since the allegorical, moral, and analogical senses are all considered spiritual interpretations, and you see that spelled out for us very nicely in Origen’s first principles. Let me just read a brief paragraph from that writing, and this comes, of course, from Volume 4 as I mentioned before of The Ante-Nicene Fathers, page 361.

“Now a spiritual interpretation,” Origen suggested, “is of this nature. When one is able to point out what are the heavenly things of which these serve as the patterns and shadow who are Jews according to the flesh and of what things future, the law contains a shadow, and any other expressions of this kind that may be found in Holy Scripture. Or when it’s a subject of inquiry, what is that wisdom hidden in a mystery which God ordained before the world for our glory, which none of the princes of the world knew. Or the meaning of the apostles’ language when employing certain illustrations from Exodus or Numbers,” he says. “These things happen to them in a figure, and they are written on our account on whom the ends of the ages have come. Now an opportunity has afforded us of understanding of what these things that happened to them were figures,” when he adds, “and they drank of that spiritual rock which followed them, and that rock was Christ.” You



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see what he’s trying to point to here? He’s pointing to not only the importance of that literal original meaning in the text, but the far more important spiritual lessons which can be drawn from it. That characterizes virtually the whole of Medieval biblical work.

We see this picked up again in part by the cathedral schools in the eleventh century, places like Paris, Leone, Utrecht and so on, but a new era of scholarship is ushered in by the eleventh century in these schools. That fundamentally divides systematic theology from biblical studies. Systematic theology and biblical studies have always been part and parcel in the Middle Ages of one another as we’ve seen, but systematic theology now becomes dominated by the Schoolmen in a separate discipline by itself. Biblical studies tends to be a separate item in the schools of its own sake. And we find biblical studies, therefore, returning more to the literal sense of exegesis than was true in the earlier years. Not that it was completely overturned at that time, but the tendency begins then in the eleventh century. During the Middle Ages, however, this four-fold pattern of interpretation predominates and it becomes the foundation, the spiritual foundation, for Medieval Christianity’s understanding of growth and development in the Christian life.

The richly varied and spiritual focused exegesis in the Middle Ages with its concern for the literal, allegorical, moral, and analogical meanings of the text is reflected in a number of the central concerns of Medieval spirituality. I want to talk with you a little bit about two of the important central concerns; namely, prayer and the growing concern for spiritual direction. Let’s turn first of all to prayer. “The principle thing,” wrote a nineteenth century Russian bishop, “is to stand before God with the intellect in the heart and to go on standing before Him unceasingly day and night until the end of life.” Here we have in rather convenient form the three basic prayer themes which we find in Medieval spirituality.

First, to pray is to stand before God not to ask for things, but to be in God’s presence to meet Him face-to-face, often this is done in silence. Secondly, to pray is to stand with the intellect in the heart, an interesting phrase. What he is suggesting here is that we come to God with the whole of our beings—our minds, our hearts, our intellects, our emotions, and we stand before God as whole beings concentrating all that we are and have in that effort to communicate with God. Third, to pray is to stand before God continually. We are, in fact, to pray without ceasing. This is not something we do so much, as something we are every moment



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of life. Prayer then is a direct encounter between living persons, the Creator and the creature. It must not be tightly confined, but the Medieval Christians felt it out to be free, spontaneous, even in a way unpredictable. We see this in the sayings of the Desert Fathers, fourth and fifth century Egypt. Abba Macarius, Father Macarius, was asked, “How shall we pray?” The old man said, “There’s no need to use a lot of words. Just stretch out your hands and say, ‘Lord, as you will and as you know best, have mercy.’ And if the conflict grows fiercer,” he wrote, “say, ‘Lord help.’” I think all of us can understand the meanings of that.

When we examine the subject more closely, we discover that many Medieval Christians actually saw life as involved in three interrelated stages, and these are very closely tied in prayer life to what we found in the quest for the mystical encounter with Christ, and you’ll remember some of that discussion. The first the active life, which begins with repentance and a re-centering of our whole lives upon God. Secondly, a contemplation of nature—to see God in all things and all things in God, to see the creation as God’s great book or handiwork to teach us and train us. And thirdly, the contemplation of God. This is a meeting of God directly face-to-face. It’s a union of love involving mind and heart, a communion with God directly as whole beings, dispelling all of our fears and our doubts and our uncertainties.

I remember a few years ago when there was debate about whether God actually exists, Billy Graham was asked, “Does God exist?” and he responded, “I know He exists, I spoke to Him this morning.” There’s something wonderfully refreshing in the simplicity of that kind of a statement. Growing out of this personal experience, an active prayer allows us then to communicate with God, the infinite Author of the universe. What an incredible privilege is ours.

The Medieval Christians place great emphasis upon unceasing prayer as they called it from Luke 18:1. Monastic life had the ideal goal of continuous prayer. This is what they called oritio. It was to be pure, brief, and frequent. Pura, brevis, frequence. It was to become a regular part of a person’s life. Now oritio was most often associated with lectio; that is, with reading. And there’s a close connection in Medieval theology between reading that of Scripture, particularly the Psalms or commentaries or early Christian writers and the like, and prayer which is this kind of interaction, interconnection, communication with God. Reading prompts prayer and prayer stimulates reading. Both of these also



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are involved with meditation as we think about the text, we think about the reading, we meditate upon the life and the ministry of Christ, and these then in turn are often surrounded by the practice of fasting. This becomes a kind of rhythm of life.

Now it’s interesting that Foster in his fascinating little book, Celebration of Discipline, and this is Richard J. Foster in his book published by Harper & Row, originally in 1978. A new edition of that has come out more recently. I want to read from that 1978 edition, because what Foster does here is to pick up all four of those elements in his discussion of the inward disciplines as he calls them—meditation, prayer, fasting, and study. This is on page thirty. Listen to some of these words. “Prayer catapults us,” Foster writes, “onto the frontier of the spiritual life. It is original research in unexplored territory. Meditation introduces us to the inner-life. Fasting is an accompanying means, but it is the discipline of prayer itself that brings us into the deepest and highest work of the human spirit. Real prayer is life-creating and life-changing.” “Prayer—secret, fervent, believing prayer lies at the root of all personal godliness,” writes William Carey.

All who have walked with God have viewed prayer as the main business of their lives. The words of Mark, “And in the morning, a great while before day, Christ rose and went out to a lonely place and there he prayed.” This stands as a commentary on the lifestyle of Jesus. David’s desire for God broke the self-indulgent chains of sleep, “Early will I seek thee” (Psalm 63). When the apostles were tempted to invest their energies in other important and necessary tasks, they determined to give themselves continually to prayer and the ministry of the Word (Acts 6). Martin Luther declared, “I have so much business, I can’t get on without spending 3 hours daily in prayer.” He held it as a spiritual axiom that he that has prayed well has studied well. John Wesley said, “God does nothing but answer to prayer,” and backed up his conviction by devoting some 2 hours daily to that sacred exercise. In fact, in his apartment in London, if you go to visit that, you can find the area, actually a piece of stone of sandstone, on which he knelt day after day to pray, and you can actually see marks in the stone where his two knees were located. It’s always deeply moving to me to see that.

“The most notable feature of David Brainerd’s life,” continuing Foster’s writing, “was his praying. His journal is permeated with accounts of prayer, fasting, and meditation. I love to be alone in my cottage where I can spend much time in prayer. I set apart to this day for secret fasting and prayer to God. When I return



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home, I give myself to meditation, prayer, and fasting.” For these explorers and the frontiers of faith, prayer was no little habit tacked on to the periphery of their lives. It was their lives. It was the most serious work of their most productive years. William Penn testified of George Fox that “above all he excelled in prayer. The most awful living reverend frame I ever felt or beheld, I must say, was in his prayer.” Adoniram Judson sought to withdraw from business and company seven times a day in order to engage in the holy work of prayer. He began at midnight and then at dawn, then at nine, twelve, three, six, and nine at night. John Hyde of India made prayer such a dominant characteristic of his life that he was nicknamed “Praying Hyde.” For these and all those who have braved the depths of the interior life, to breathe was to pray. A very interesting reflection, and we see here in Foster, this interconnection of those inward disciplines, disciplines of meditation, prayer, fasting, and study, which tend to go together.

From the end of the eleventh century, prayer became the object of an expanding body of literature. Anselm composed his meditations on prayer. John Fecamp composed his theological confession. Arnold of Bonneval edited his mediations, all of them calling for more methodical practice of prayer. One cannot understand Medieval spirituality without understanding the great and central focus which it placed upon prayer, and it’s a lesson that we need to learn in our day. Most of us tend to pray only brief times, if at all, throughout our day. The Medieval saints teach us that we must commit ourselves to disciplined prayer on a regular basis, and it’s out of that then that will flow the abundant Christian life and effectiveness in the ministries God has called us to perform.

Along with the interest in prayer, is a strong and growing interest in spiritual guidance. The spiritual guidance or care of souls has, of course, been a major theme in much of Christian literature. It was certainly a central concern in the Middle Ages. Numerous letters of Augustine, Ambrose, Anselm, and others, were directed to explicit spiritual guidance for individuals who wrote. One could read some very fascinating correspondence which Augustine had from literally hundreds of people who wrote to him when he was bishop in Hippo to ask his advice about the faith and how they ought to live it out. He gave very straightforward, candid, and sometimes very amusing advice in his letters.

A kind of moral guidance was also the focus in various larger writings, such as the work of Clement of Alexandria in his book on the teachers or Gregory of Nyssa on virginity or John Climacus



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in The Ladder of Divine Ascent. In that latter work he called for the necessity of having a spiritual guide or director. We saw that already in Gregory the Great’s pastoral care. His writing which was specifically geared toward the clergy and toward the guidance of the clergy. Then he helps tell people how to do that through very specific guidance as to even how to preach to various classes and conditions of people. But at the end he comes back to that marvelous affirmation that the pastor, the preacher, must take heed for himself or herself, lest in preaching to others, they themselves fall by the wayside. This theme is picked up powerfully also by one of the great Puritan writers, Richard Baxter in his own marvelous little book on The Reformed Pastor.

Christianity has always taught that the true guide of Christians is the Holy Spirit, and here we find a marked difference between Christianity on the one side and most of the other religious traditions on the other. In the other traditions you have such things as Hindu gurus or Zen masters or Sufi sheikhs or others. This master/disciple relationship is a very familiar part of religious practice. But among Christians, the spiritual master functions in a very different way. Spiritual direction in the most fundamental sense is God’s work, exercised through the Scriptures and by the operation and power and work of the Holy Spirit. It is God who is the great spiritual director, and those who come alongside to help are facilitators in that process, but never are to be the new Christian gurus or those who become the spiritual directors in that sense, in an absolute obedient sense, for those who are the followers.

Christians are always careful to avoid usurping the role of the Holy Spirit and groups get in trouble when they don’t. In fact, many of the unfortunate movements, the perverse and heretical movements in the church, have been spawned precisely because someone has taken over that role which God Himself is able to perform and has become the great spiritual guru or master. Honor and worship are for God alone, not for any human intermediary. That’s part of the teaching of the early church and the Reformers and others on the priesthood of all believers.

Spiritual direction, then, in the Christian sense is always careful to avoid this replacement of God’s task by some human intermediary. Nonetheless, we find spiritual direction an important part of Christian life in the Middle Ages as in other eras, and we see it focused largely around institutionalized Monasticism and some of the desert practices of the hermits and monks. The spiritual



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authority of the abbot in the monasteries (we’ve had a chance to look at some of that before), the requirement of absolute obedience by the monks, is perhaps the closest things we have to this kind of spiritual director in the Middle Ages. This is especially true in the desert areas, such as the Judean wilderness, where men and women were drawn to find what they called an elder, a spiritual teacher, a guide to help them in their growth. We see this relationship powerfully in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. There’s a wonderful collection of these sayings of the desert fathers, which has been translated and edited by Benedicta Ward and published by Mowbray in Oxford. The edition I have is from 1975, and what it contains are some interesting accounts of how these spiritual leaders in the desert helped to guide those who were seeking to grow in the faith. Some of it is very practical advice. Let me give you the example from Sylvanus, who was a Palestinian, and whose account is included in this little collection of the sayings of the desert fathers on page 223.

“A brother went to see Abba Sylvanus in the mountain of Sinai. When he saw the brothers working hard, he said to the old man, ‘Do not labor for the food which perishes (John 6), Mary has chosen the good portion (Luke 10).’ The old man said to his disciple, ‘Zacharias give the brother a book and put him in a cell without anything else.’ So when the ninth hour came, the visitor watched the door expecting someone would call to get him for the meal. When no one called, he got up, went to find the old man, and said to him, ‘Have the brothers not eaten today?’ The old man replied that they had. Then he said, ‘Why didn’t you call me?’ The old man said to him, ‘Because you are a spiritual man and you do not need that kind of food. We being carnal want to eat; that’s why we work. But you have chosen the good portion and read the whole day long and you do not want to eat carnal food.’ When he heard these words, the brother made a prostration saying, ‘Forgive me, father.’ The old man said to him, ‘Mary needs Martha. It is really thanks to Martha that Mary is praised.’” Some good old fashioned common sense in wisdom of these desert leaders, helping their younger counterparts to grow in the faith, to understand things that in their immaturity the often did not understand.

The role, then, of Abba or Amma, fathers and mothers in the desert communities, reflects the fact that such spiritual guidance took place. We know very little, however, about the techniques of spiritual direction. We do know that they display great patience, wisdom, gentleness, and forbearance for their disciples. We also know that these desert fathers and mothers practiced what might



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be called the manifestation of thoughts, the practice of making known to the elder all that was going on in the heart. This is much broader than a kind of sacramental confession. Its aim is not absolution of guilt, but discernment about one’s personality. It’s to help a person know himself. And here the elder performed the task of a physician of the soul. As John Cassian wrote, “The foul serpent from the dark underground cavern must be released otherwise it will rot.”

For the desert elders, the spiritual gifts of discernment meant moderation, balance, and prudence. The ability to read hearts was a power only given by God. Discernment is the foundation for which all virtues exist and without it there’s no spiritual growth. As Anthony, the great early monastic wrote, “Some have afflicted their bodies by asceticism, but they lack discernment, and so they are far from God.”

The ability to give a word of spiritual counsel was called prophecy in the Middle Ages. Prophecy was a direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit given for the purpose of guiding others. The close relationship here again is always the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The spiritual guide is never a substitute, but one who is gifted by God to help people to see how they need to grow and where. In our day, of course, there’s enormous renewal of interest in spiritual direction. Some of this looks back to seventeenth century France, which is often seen as the Golden Age of Spiritual Direction. Looking back to people like Fenelon, Francis de Sales, and so on.

The model of friendship seems to be the most popular model for director/directee relationships, far more egalitarian than the parent/child model, which is another option. But there’s always a danger that in seeing a spiritual director that one comes to understand them only as another professional minister with another form of ministry, a skill which perhaps involves more counseling and psychological abilities. .

The Middle Ages reminds us that spiritual direction was not simply another professional branch of ministry. It was a special gift from above of discernment, of understanding, so that those who needed to be grown in the faith could find help in so doing. The Desert Abbas and Ammas kept paramount the fact that while God could gift them to facilitate growth and spirituality, only the Holy Spirit was the true guide of souls. Friends can help, certainly as we walk the pathway of sanctification, but we should not see for spiritual gurus or religious dictators or surrogate parents. We


Christ-Centered Learning — Anytime, Anywhere

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should seek, and in fact not be satisfied until we find our true spiritual guide, the Holy Spirit, opening the Scriptures to us with clarity and power. Such clarify and power that we fall before God’s thrown in obedience, submission, and faith. One of the greatest gifts that we can give to one another is praying for them and their spiritual growth. And in this way the central emphases of the Middle Ages on prayer and spiritual guidance come together.

There are wonderful resources for those of you who may be interested in pursuing this matter further. McGinn, Meyendorff, and Leclericq put out a book called Christian Spirituality: Origins to the Twelfth Century, Crossroads Press, 1989. It’s an excellent source to begin opening this field. Gordon Wakefield has edited The Westminster Dictionary of Spirituality, Westminster Press, 1985, which is another wonderful source, as is The Classics of Western Spirituality Series by Paulist Press, which is still coming out. It’s a multivolume series. It’s a wonderful resource for study of spirituality in the Middle Ages. We have much to learn, I think, from Medieval spirituality. Let me suggest in summary the ways in which this can come.

We learn from Medieval spirituality the centrality of the Bible, our foundation, the only true foundation for genuine spiritual growth. We find there also the guidance and instruction of the Holy Spirit, our primary spiritual director. And we find there the importance and power of prayer which should characterize our lives continually. And finally, we discover there the balance of head, heart, and hands, as we seek to understand and live out the faith in a needy world.

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