Jean Khoury

Summary: The Second Vatican Council never asked that the classical distribution of the years of philosophy and theology be replaced by a new architecture. What it asked for was something more demanding: a renewal of the very finality of formation, so that philosophy and theology would lead the seminarian not merely to correct knowledge but to a real, lived encounter with the mystery of Christ. Sixty years later, I believe this deeper renewal remains largely unaccomplished. In this article I argue that beneath today’s apparent religious indifference there persists a genuine search for the divine, one that calls for philosophy to recover something of its ancient identity as a practised wisdom without abandoning its metaphysical core; that spiritual theology cannot remain a discipline among others but must become the criterion by which every theological discipline is measured, because a theology, a Scripture, a dogma, a liturgy or a moral teaching that does not lead to real transformation in Christ remains, whatever its intellectual precision, a veneer; and that the central and still unaddressed lacuna in our formation is the absence of a clear, common supernatural anthropology describing what the Holy Spirit actually accomplishes in the human person along the whole spiritual journey, of the kind St. John of the Cross possessed. Without this cornerstone, I contend, our repeated proclamation that all the baptised are called to holiness risks becoming a slogan rather than a genuine pedagogy of transformation.

Introduction

The Second Vatican Council never asked that the two years of philosophy followed by four years of theology be replaced by some other formula. This is a plain historical fact, and it needs to be stated clearly before anything else, because a great deal of confusion in the post-conciliar period has come from forgetting it. Optatam Totius calls for the laws governing seminaries to be revised so that they may respond ever better to present pastoral needs and new conditions, and it insists that the diversity of peoples and regions requires different solutions. But nowhere does the Council instruct that philosophy be shortened, that theology be reordered, or that the classical distribution of years be abandoned. What the Council changed was something more fundamental than a timetable: it changed the very conception of what philosophical and theological formation is for.

I want to take up, in this article, the question that this conciliar reorientation leaves genuinely open today, and to press it further than most formation documents have been willing to press it. The question is not architectural. It is not: how many years, in what order, with which subjects. The question is: what is philosophy and theology in the seminary actually for? Is their purpose to produce a person who knows correct things about God, or a person who has been, and who continues to be, transformed by God? I hold that the answer must be the second, and that if this is true, then almost everything about how we structure, teach and evaluate philosophical and theological formation needs to be reconsidered — not by inventing new subjects for their own sake, but by recovering the finality that the whole enterprise has, in large part, lost sight of.

I write as someone who remembers the experimentation of the post-conciliar decades: the attempts to abolish philosophy altogether, the reordering of disciplines, the search for new formulas. I have watched most of that experimentation quietly reverse itself, so that seminaries today have largely returned to the classical architecture of two years of philosophy followed by four years of theology. The one genuine and lasting innovation to emerge from those years is the propaedeutic year, whose first stirrings I witnessed at the end of the 1980s in France, in the early experience of Jeunesse et Lumière, long before its progressive generalisation. But this return to the classical architecture, welcome as it is in many respects, has not been accompanied by an equally serious return to the deeper question the Council actually raised. We have kept the frame, and I fear we have too often lost the fire.

I. A Council that Renewed Without Prescribing

It is worth recalling precisely what the Council did and did not say, because the historical record protects us from two opposite errors: the error of imagining that Vatican II demanded the experiments of the 1970s, and the error of imagining that nothing needed to change at all. Optatam Totius calls for reform, but not for a single model. Its most decisive text is not about the number of years but about their unity and their centre: Philosophical and theological disciplines are to be so arranged that the students may see clearly first of all Christ, who is the centre of the whole history of salvation.  (Optatam Totius, n. 14)

This single sentence, more than any administrative reshuffling, is what should have driven the renewal of formation. It calls for the unity of disciplines around the mystery of Christ, for a pastoral orientation of theology, and — in a phrase too rarely remembered — for attention to “the advances made by sound psychology and pedagogy” (Optatam Totius, n. 11). It was this last phrase, read against the cultural climate of the years following 1968, that led many formators to believe that the very structure of studies had to be dismantled: disciplines merged, philosophy shortened or displaced, pastoral placements introduced from the first year, entire communities reorganised. Much of this belonged less to the explicit intention of the Council Fathers than to the general questioning of every Western institution that marked those years. It is often difficult, in hindsight, to separate what truly came from the Council from what belonged to the spirit of that decade.

The Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis Sacerdotalis of 1970 authorised episcopal conferences to adapt formation concretely to local needs, and this freedom produced, across the following fifteen years, an extraordinary diversity of models — most of which did not last. From the 1980s onward, under Pope John Paul II, there was a clear movement toward stabilisation. Sapientia Christiana (1979) and then Pastores Dabo Vobis (1992) reaffirmed the indispensable place of philosophy and of solid doctrinal formation, while Pastores Dabo Vobis systematised formation into four dimensions — human, spiritual, intellectual and pastoral — that remain the reference point today. The one true and lasting structural innovation of this whole period is the propaedeutic year, now presented in the Ratio Fundamentalis of 2016 as a normally distinct stage preceding philosophical studies. We have, for the most part, returned to the classical architecture of philosophical and theological studies while adding this preparatory stage. But this return is not simply a restoration of the pre-conciliar model, because formation is now meant to be conceived in a far more integrated way. The difficulty is that this integration has too often remained an intention rather than a reality.

II. Beneath the Indifference, a Search for God

If the architecture of years is largely settled, the deeper question the Council opened is not. Today’s seminarian does not arrive asking whether universals exist or whether the intellect abstracts forms from matter. He arrives with questions about meaning, identity, consciousness, experience, suffering, transcendence and spiritual fulfilment. I am convinced that beneath the indifference so often noted in our culture there remains a real, if fragmented, search for the divine — a desire for experience that has not disappeared but has migrated, often into forms our seminaries are not trained to recognise: meditation, therapy, Eastern spiritual practice, the vague but persistent hunger that our contemporaries call, for want of a better word, spirituality.

This displacement of the religious desire, rather than its disappearance, is what should reshape the two years of philosophy — not by abandoning their proper content, but by reorienting the manner in which that content is taught and by widening, carefully and without confusion, the field of what is studied.

III. Retaining the Core, Recovering the Exercise

I want to be entirely clear about what I am not proposing. I am not proposing that the current philosophical curriculum be replaced. The two courses on Thomistic realism — its metaphysics and its theory of knowledge — remain essential. It remains essential to understand Kant’s subjectivism, Husserl’s phenomenology as it extends to Heidegger, Jean Guitton’s philosophy of time, Maritain’s distinction between the individual and the person, and the whole question of the relationship between philosophy and theology. None of this is negotiable, and none of it should be diluted.

What I am proposing is that greater emphasis be placed on a set of disciplines that concern spiritual exercise, the search for God in other religious traditions, the experience of the divine, and the question of spiritual experience as such. Today’s challenges have shifted, and I ask directly: should the spiritual exercises described by Pierre Hadot — that is, the understanding of Greek philosophy as a genuine quest whose very path consists of spiritual exercises — together with Jung’s exploration of the depths of the soul, the path proposed by Hinduism even to the sublime heights and depths of Vedanta, and the meditative disciplines of Sufism (dhikr) and Buddhism (Zen and its cognates), be brought to meet this challenge? Hadot’s own formula captures exactly what I mean: Ancient philosophy was a way of life.  (Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life)

This is the essential recovery I am arguing for. It seems to me that there are three distinct issues bound together here, and I want to state each with precision.

First, a theology disconnected from the spiritual life must be called to account, and should strive to exist in no other way: at every point it studies, it should demonstrate its connection with spiritual experience. Doing so would broaden and deepen spiritual theology, together with its vocation and its place within the whole of theology.

Second, there is an absolute necessity to offer a solid, well-conceived, comprehensive programme of spiritual formation that faithfully follows the stages of the spiritual journey — a formation with an entirely solid foundation, practical in character, and thoroughly informed about the workings of grace, its catalysts, its growth, and its decisive turning points. See here the Solid Foundations Course and the following.

Third, and specifically with regard to philosophy, I propose a twofold dimension: a return to spiritual exercise, to the search for God, for the divine, and for experience; the integration of Jung’s insights into the depths of the soul; a reconsideration of philosophy in its necessary components; and an understanding of philosophy, of the different ways of thinking, in their relationship to theology and their influence upon it — their advantages, their disadvantages, their risks, their deviations, and their unconscious assumptions. None of this replaces the philosophical curriculum I named above. It becomes, rather, an organising perspective around that enduring core.

IV. From Concept to Encounter: What Optatam Totius 16 Actually Asks

A theology that remains abstract, purely intellectual, even rigidly dogmatic without any link to Christian life and experience, is not a neutral or merely cautious position. I consider it dangerous. Experience has become something of a taboo in our theological culture, yet experience is the key: Christ asked us to be witnesses that He is alive, present and acting in our life today. A speculative approach to theology, and to philosophy, that stops short of this remains abstract — and I am not against speculation, but I find its isolation from experience genuinely perilous.

Optatam Totius 16 says this clearly. The Council does not ask merely that theology be taught correctly; it asks that the student be led to experience what he studies: The theological disciplines are to be taught in such a way that the students may draw the Catholic doctrine carefully from divine Revelation, penetrate its meaning deeply, make it the nourishment of their spiritual life, and be able to proclaim, explain and defend it in their priestly ministry.  (Optatam Totius, n. 16)

“Make it the nourishment of their spiritual life” is not a decorative phrase appended to an otherwise intellectual programme. It is the criterion of the whole enterprise. Applied to Scripture, for instance, the question can no longer be only “what does this text mean”, but must become: how do I meet, in these Scriptures, the Living Word? What kind of contemplation does this bring me? Is it subjective? How can my experience be real, even while it remains a journey? The goal of the baptised is precisely this journey of spiritual growth, one that reaches holiness, union with Jesus, and the fullness of love. God will not judge us on our theological knowledge, but on how much of us has been changed and transformed in Christ. As St John of the Cross is remembered as saying: In the evening of life, we will be judged on love.  (St. John of the Cross)

It is in this sense that I hold spiritual theology to be the major theological discipline, one that must precede and support, already within the two years of philosophy, the disciplines that resonate with and prepare for this same orientation — the spiritual exercises of Hadot, the exploration Jung offers of the soul, and the comparative encounter with the paths of Hinduism, Buddhism and Sufism.

V. Spiritual Theology Must Be the Criterion, Not an Appendix

I want to be direct about a distinction that is often proposed as a safeguard but that I believe is, in fact, a symptom of the problem: the claim that spiritual theology should not become the criterion by which every other discipline is measured, lest it reduce philosophy, dogmatic theology or biblical studies to a merely subjective spiritual application. I disagree with this entirely. Spiritual theology should be the criterion.

If I do not have an experience of Christ that is objective and really growing, how can I witness to Him? If I read the lives of the saints, every one of them has an experience of Christ. This is what formation must produce. Without it, Scripture is just a book; dogma is just a rigid affirmation; liturgy is just external acts; moral theology is just commandments executed from the outside. And the same is true of pastoral work. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says this very clearly in the opening of its fourth part, on prayer: none of the first three parts — the Creed, the sacraments, the moral life — can be alive and real without the life of prayer and the Spirit that is their common root. This mystery, then, requires that the faithful believe in it, that they celebrate it, and that they live from it in a vital and personal relationship with the living and true God. This relationship is prayer.  (Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2558)

The Gospel, without our being transformed by it, is void. It is meant to transform us in reality, not merely to inform us. This is why I consider the theology of grace and of the theological virtues, as commonly taught today, to be too shallow. A course on pneumatology (Theology of the Holy Spirit) needs to be the leading course — the one that organises the whole of theological study, rather than a subsection folded quietly into the treatise on grace.

VI. The Fear of the Elephant in the Room

Everybody assumes that spiritual life and spiritual theology are subjective, as though this were self-evident. It is not. There is a real and objectively growing, transforming life inside every human subject, and our fear of naming and studying this personal experience is paralysing us. This fear comes from a clear ignorance of true spiritual theology and of the objectivity of what actually happens inside the human being. By avoiding the elephant in the room, we are shooting ourselves in the foot — gloriously. Everything becomes a veneer, because we fear entering into the human being. We want to reduce the mystery of God’s action within us by removing it, by treating it as though it were a private, personal matter rather than something real that needs care.

I find the image of a garden exact: I have a garden — myself — but I do not want to go there, because I have no idea what gardening is, what a plant needs, how to water it. When will we come out of this dead end? I do not ask this rhetorically. I ask it as the single most urgent question facing theological and spiritual formation today.

VII. From History to Practice: Becoming Philosophers and Theologians

We need to move from treating the years of philosophy and theology as historical studies to treating them as a practice. This means learning how to philosophise, how to practise philosophy, how to see “being” — practising the spiritual exercises that Pierre Hadot identifies within Greek philosophy itself, rather than merely narrating their history. We are called not to recite the history of philosophy and theology, but to become philosophers and theologians ourselves — not in a pompous way, but in a practical way, even if only through small steps. This requires moving from the concept, from the history, toward a personal approach: from knowing about a thinker to entering, oneself, into the act of thinking, and eventually into the act of contemplating.

Another sub-elephant in the room is the question of contemplation. The Western Church has been deeply affected by the unresolved debates between different schools of spirituality and theology in the 1930s and 1940s, especially concerning the nature of contemplation and its relationship with the ordinary Christian life. The trauma of these debates has been such that, even in a Vatican document on Contemplative Life from the early 1980s, when the question of contemplation arises, the approach is effectively: “we will not enter into this question.” The trauma is clear.

Today, everyone has heard the word “contemplation” used in many different contexts and by many different groups. Yet the lack of theological clarity concerning such a fundamental reality of Christian life prevents us from advancing. Contemplation cannot remain an ambiguous or almost forbidden term. It is an essential dimension of the Christian vocation because it concerns the way in which the human person comes to know, receive and be transformed by God. Essentially, to contemplate is to receive God and to welcome his action within us.

There are, in fact, different forms of contemplation, which must be distinguished without being separated.

The first is the contemplation proper to lectio divina: the attentive listening to the Word of God, receiving Christ who speaks through the Scriptures, allowing his Word to penetrate the heart and become the principle of conversion and action. It is the movement expressed in the biblical invitation: “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only” (Jas 1:22).

The second is the contemplation proper to the reception of Communion, expressed especially in Contemplative Prayer and Adoration, also in arrow prayers. Here the emphasis is on the loving encounter in the depth of our being with the indwelling Trinity, the silent presence of God, and the progressive transformation of the person through communion with Him.

The third is the contemplation of the mysteries of faith, which can develop particularly within theological reflection. The theologian is not called merely to analyse revealed mysteries from the outside, but to contemplate them from within the act of faith, allowing the intellect illuminated by grace to enter more deeply into the mystery of God.

These three forms of contemplation are not competing realities. They correspond to different dimensions of the one Christian encounter with God and each develops progressively according to the journey of spiritual growth. The Word received in faith, the presence of God encountered in prayer, and the mysteries of faith contemplated by the intelligence all belong to the same movement: the transformation of the human person into Christ through the action of the Holy Spirit. These three forms of contemplation each undergo a process of development; they therefore have their own stages and qualities, corresponding to the progressive growth of the spiritual life.

The difficulty today is that we often speak of contemplation without a clear understanding of its place within the overall dynamic of Christian life. Yet without a proper theology of contemplation, it becomes difficult to articulate the journey towards holiness, because contemplation is not an optional experience reserved for a few; it belongs to the full development of the life of grace.

VIII. The Missing Cornerstone: A Supernatural Anthropology

Here is the question I consider decisive, and to which I have not yet found a satisfying answer in contemporary formation: who today can identify a clear “supernatural anthropology” — one describing where God works, where the Holy Spirit works — comparable to the one St. John of the Cross possessed and articulated (body (senses/sense), soul (conscious part), spirit (above consciousness)? If such an anthropology is not identified, it is, I believe, impossible to build a proper theology and a proper spiritual Theology that guides it.

Christ is at the centre — Christocentrism is fundamental, and I do not depart from it for a moment. But the centre of the work of Christ and of His Holy Spirit is the human being, and the transformation of the human being. He came to save us, to give us the Fire of his Holy Spirit; He is the road, the journey, the transformative journey itself. And here I think of Nicodemus (John 3:10: ““You are Israel’s teacher,” said Jesus, “and do you not understand these things?”). Like him, we are doctors in the “Israel of God” (Ga 6:16), learned in doctrine, and yet we remain largely ignorant in this precise field: the field of supernatural anthropology, of spiritual transformation, of the entire and complete working of the Holy Spirit in us, across the whole of the journey.

IX. What Theology Must Be Occupied With, Day and Night

Theology should be occupied, day and night, with this single question: what exactly happens in the human person when Christ, through the Holy Spirit, transforms him? This is the centre of pastoral work, of the entire work of the Church. Christ came to save, to transform, to sanctify — not merely to help us identify sin and send us to confession. He goes infinitely further than this. This is why a proper spiritual theology, one that supports a proper spiritual formation, is the main task of theology: the guiding thread running through everything we do, the measure, the criterion. Otherwise we keep avoiding the elephant in the room, and pastoral activity risks becoming a headlong rush — what I would call, in plain terms, a fuite en avant — multiplying programmes and initiatives without knowing where, ultimately, they are meant to lead.

X. The Shocking Absence of a Course on the Holy Spirit

I find it genuinely shocking that, to this day, the dogmatic curriculum does not include a proper foundational course on the Holy Spirit comparable in weight and rigour to De Deo Uno, to Christology, or to Ecclesiology. “Grace and the theological virtues” is not enough. This absence is, I believe, a clear symptom of an immense neglect, even a deviation, within theology as it is generally taught.

Spiritual life remains, in practice, a taboo. We do not see how solid and how real it is. We do not see that the real transformation of the human being is not only possible but that it follows a genuine road map, one that the great spiritual masters have already traced with precision. Instead, we remain confused and divided between competing schools of spirituality, without having identified their common denominator. And, above all, we continue to proclaim — almost like headless chickens, and I do not find a more polite word for it — that “all are called to holiness”, without the pedagogy that would make this call into anything more than a slogan. (See the Solid Foundations Course)

Practical Consequences

Before drawing my conclusion, I want to state plainly what this argument requires in practice, for those responsible for philosophical and theological formation.

For the philosophical curriculum

The existing core must be retained in full: Thomistic metaphysics and epistemology, the study of Kant’s subjectivism, Husserl’s phenomenology as it extends into Heidegger (seeing its lacks), Guitton’s philosophy of time, Maritain’s distinction between the “individual” and the “person”, and the study of the relationship between philosophy and theology. Around this core, the pedagogy itself must shift from a historical survey of systems to a practised philosophising: seminarians should be trained in the spiritual exercises Hadot describes within ancient philosophy, introduced to Jung’s exploration of the depths of the soul, and given a comparative encounter with the paths proposed by Hinduism, Buddhism and Sufism — not as substitutes for philosophy, but as material through which they learn to understand the contemporary search for the divine. Each philosophical system studied should be examined explicitly for its influence upon theology: what it makes possible, what it obscures, and which unconscious assumptions it introduces.

For the theological curriculum

A genuine foundational course on the Holy Spirit, equal in stature and rigour to De Deo Uno, Christology and Ecclesiology, needs to be instituted. Spiritual theology should function as the organising criterion running through the study of Scripture, dogma, liturgy, moral theology and pastoral formation alike: each discipline should be required, at every point it studies, to demonstrate its connection to lived spiritual transformation. (see Integral Theology Project)

For spiritual formation

A solid, comprehensive and practical programme of spiritual formation must be built, one that faithfully follows the objective stages of the spiritual journey and that is thoroughly informed about the workings of grace — not a devotional addition to academic study, but a structured and accompanied path, drawing a coherent common denominator from the great witnesses of the tradition. (see the Three Plus Year Plan of Spiritual Formation)

For those responsible for formation

Bishops, formation directors and those who design seminary curricula need to revise them in this light, ensuring that teaching itself moves from a historical and descriptive mode toward an experiential and practised one, with disciplines such as lectio divina and Prayer of the Heart, integrated into the very structure of courses rather than appended to them.

It goes without saying that such a profound shift in both the content and the method of teaching and learning philosophy and theology would require formation sessions for theology professors themselves. They would need to be invited to reconsider their own approach and to learn anew from the living tradition of the Church how to recover a truly unified vision of theology, in which theological content and personal life are not separated but deeply communicate with one another and ultimately serve one single purpose: the transformation of the person in Christ.

Conclusion

Christ said that He came so that we might have life, and have it abundantly. That abundant life is precisely what a merely historical or purely speculative formation cannot, by itself, communicate. The question that must guide the renewal of philosophy and theology in the seminary is not how many years, in what order, with which subjects — that question, the Council itself left to our freedom and our judgement. The question is whether our formation leads a person merely to speak correctly about God, or to become a person in whom God truly lives and acts.

I have argued that beneath today’s apparent indifference there remains a genuine search for the divine, one that calls philosophy back toward its ancient identity as a practised wisdom without abandoning its metaphysical core. I have argued that spiritual theology cannot remain one department among others, applied afterward to the conclusions of dogma, Scripture, liturgy and morals; it must be their criterion, because a theology that does not lead to real transformation remains, however precise, a veneer. And I have argued that the central task before us is to recover, or to construct anew, a clear and common supernatural anthropology — a genuine road map of what the Holy Spirit does in the human person along the whole of the spiritual journey, of the kind St. John of the Cross possessed and could teach with such precision.

Until this cornerstone is in place, our repeated proclamation that all the baptised are called to holiness will remain, I fear, a slogan rather than a pedagogy. The garden is there, within each of us. It is time we learned, again, the art of entering it.

Read also:

The Meaning of Sapiential Formation in Priestly Formation

Spiritual Formation as a Journey

Bibliography

Second Vatican Council, Optatam Totius: Decree on Priestly Training (28 October 1965), nn. 1, 11, 14, 15, 16.

Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium: Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (21 November 1964), n. 40.

Second Vatican Council, Nostra Aetate: Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (28 October 1965), n. 2.

Congregation for the Clergy, Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis Sacerdotalis (1970; rev. 2016, The Gift of the Priestly Vocation).

Pope John Paul II, Pastores Dabo Vobis: Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the Formation of Priests (25 March 1992).

Pope John Paul II, Sapientia Christiana (15 April 1979).

Catechism of the Catholic Church, Part Four, n. 2558 and following.

Sacred Scripture: John 3:5, 3:10, 10:10, 1:12; Galatians 2:20, 4:6; 1 Corinthians 3:16; 2 Corinthians 3:18; Acts 4:20; 1 John 1:1.

St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q.1, a.8; I, q.43, a.3; I-II, q.110-112.

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St Augustine, Contra Faustum, XXXII, 18.

Evagrius Ponticus, On Prayer (Chapters on Prayer), n. 60.

St Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation of the Word, 54.

Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, 3 vols. (New York: Herder & Herder / Seabury Press, 1983).

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, The Three Ages of the Interior Life (St Louis: B. Herder, 1947-48).

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, and Theo-Drama.