A Study in Biblical and Spiritual Theology
Jean Khoury
Summary: This article examines a striking disproportion within the memory of the People of God: the Exodus (the liberation from Egypt) occupies an overwhelming place in Israel’s narrative, liturgy, law, and prophetic imagination, while the true goal of the covenant, God’s stable indwelling among his people in the Temple, receives comparatively little psychological weight. Reading the whole itinerary from Abraham to Solomon as a single, providentially composed book of spiritual theology (a kind of Old Testament Interior Castle) this study proposes that the sequence Abraham, Exodus, Sinai, Jordan, Conquest, and Temple already contains the goal and the stages of the spiritual life: call, liberation, law and Spirit, purification, combat, and union. The same imbalance reappears in the New Testament and in contemporary Christian consciousness, where the Paschal Mystery, baptism, and conversion are constantly invoked, while union with God — the true indwelling, the true Temple — remains comparatively unknown as a concrete goal with concrete stages. The article concludes with practical proposals for catechesis and formation that would restore the goal, and the stages leading to it, to their rightful place.
Introduction
Anyone who reads the Old Testament attentively notices an arresting fact: the Exodus from Egypt is remembered, celebrated, and invoked far more than any other event in Israel’s history — more, even, than the event towards which the Exodus itself was ordered, namely the dwelling of God among his people in the Temple. This is not a marginal literary curiosity. It is a theological and psychological phenomenon that deserves to be named, quantified, and understood, because it repeats itself, almost identically, in the economy of the New Covenant and in the ordinary experience of Christian life today.
We constantly say that the centre of our life is the death and Resurrection of the Lord. This is true. We say that in baptism we are immersed in Christ’s death and raised with him to newness of life. This too is true. We say that the Mass makes present the Paschal Mystery. Again, true. Yet none of this is, strictly speaking, the goal. It is, like the Exodus, the necessary and glorious beginning of a journey whose destination is union with God — the indwelling of his Eyes and his Heart within us, as he once promised to dwell within the Temple of Jerusalem. The purpose of this article is to show, first, that the Old Testament itself already displays this imbalance between memory and goal; second, that the entire itinerary from Abraham to Solomon constitutes, almost as if by providential design, a complete and marvellously ordered treatise of spiritual theology, comparable to St Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle; and third, that the Church today suffers from an analogous imbalance, remembering her Exodus — conversion, baptism, the Paschal Mystery — far more than she pursues her Temple, which is union with God in Christ.
Part One — Quantifying a Disproportion: The Exodus in Israel’s Memory
The prominence of the Exodus within the Old Testament can be measured with some precision, and the result confirms what biblical scholars have long observed: it is the single most remembered saving event in the history of Israel. It is anticipated centuries in advance, already announced to Abraham — “Know this for certain, that your offspring shall be aliens in a land that is not theirs… but afterwards they shall come out with great possessions” (Genesis 15:13–14) — and renewed to Isaac, to Jacob, and to the dying Joseph, who asks that his bones be carried up when God “visits” his people (Genesis 50:24–25).
The narrative itself occupies an extraordinary amount of Scripture. From Exodus 1 to Joshua 24 — roughly one-sixth of the entire Old Testament — the text recounts the liberation from Egypt, the covenant of Sinai, the years in the wilderness, and the entry into the Land. After the event, the references never cease: well over a hundred and twenty explicit recollections occur throughout the rest of the Old Testament, together with countless allusions. Brevard Childs could rightly call it “Israel’s primary confession of faith, the decisive redemptive event by which all subsequent acts of God were interpreted,” and Gerhard von Rad observed that the ancient creed of Israel placed at its centre “not creation but the saving acts of God in history, above all the deliverance from Egypt.”
The historical books constantly return to it — Joshua before renewing the covenant (Joshua 24), Judges, Samuel, Kings. The prophets reinterpret virtually every crisis through it: Hosea’s “out of Egypt I called my son” (Hosea 11:1), Isaiah’s new Exodus in chapters 40–55, Jeremiah’s and Ezekiel’s constant appeal to it as the proof of covenant fidelity. Walter Brueggemann rightly named it “the dominant imaginative memory of Israel, the paradigm through which Israel understood both its past and its future.” Around twenty psalms recount or celebrate it explicitly, and more than twenty laws ground themselves in the memory of slavery in Egypt, so that care for the stranger, the widow, and the poor becomes an obligation flowing directly from Israel’s own liberation. Deuteronomy makes it a perpetual act of remembrance, taught to children and re-enacted every year in the Passover.
As Rolf Rendtorff summarised the matter: “The Exodus is the fundamental event of Israel’s history. Israel understands itself, its faith, and its relationship with God from this event.” Every one of these observations is correct. And yet, precisely because they are correct, they raise a question that is rarely asked: is the Exodus, for all its dominance in Israel’s memory, actually the highest point of God’s plan for Israel? The Old Testament’s own theology answers, quite clearly, that it is not.
Part Two — The True Goal within the First Covenant: The Temple as Indwelling
The Exodus is not an end in itself. Even before Moses returns to Egypt, God has already declared his intention: “Let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst” (Exodus 25:8). And when God commands Pharaoh to release his people, the purpose given is not freedom as such but worship: “Let my people go, that they may serve me” (Exodus 7:16). The Hebrew ʿābad means both “to serve” and “to worship”: liberation exists for worship, and worship, in the theology of the First Covenant, culminates in a stable and permanent dwelling of God among his people.
This is precisely the trajectory of the historical books. The Land itself, in Deuteronomy, is never merely territory; it is repeatedly described as the place “that the Lord your God will choose to make his name dwell there” (Deuteronomy 12:5, 11). The whole itinerary — Abraham, election, Exodus, Sinai, wilderness, Land, Jerusalem — converges on a single climax: the dedication of Solomon’s Temple. “I have indeed built you an exalted house, a place for you to dwell in for ever,” Solomon declares (1 Kings 8:13), and God’s own reply surpasses even this: “I have consecrated this house… my name shall be there for ever; my eyes and my heart will be there for all time” (1 Kings 9:3). This is arguably one of the highest theological statements in the entire Old Testament, and it must be read within its own covenantal horizon, not retrojected through the lens of what came later.
It would therefore be a serious error to describe the Temple, within the theology of the First Covenant, as something intrinsically provisional, fragile, or destined to fail. Within the horizon of Israel’s own faith, God’s goal is stability: a great house, built to endure, in which his Eyes and his Heart would remain perpetually. This is why its destruction was experienced, quite rightly, as a cataclysm — the unimaginable collapse of the very point towards which the whole of Israel’s history had been moving. Psalm 137, Lamentations, and much of Jeremiah and Ezekiel are unintelligible unless one grasps how absolute that catastrophe was. And this is also why, centuries later, the disciples of Jesus — faithful Jews, formed entirely within the piety of the First Covenant — could stand before its stones and exclaim, “Look, Teacher, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings!” (Mark 13:1). They were not admiring architecture. They were expressing the conviction, entirely correct within their own covenant, that this was the place where heaven and earth met, where the Name of God dwelt, and where the vocation of Israel found its rest.
St. Thomas Aquinas states a principle that clarifies the whole question: “The end is always more noble than the means” (Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 1, a. 4). If the Exodus is the means and the indwelling of God is the end, then the Temple — not the Red Sea — is objectively the greater reality within the economy of the First Covenant. And yet Israel’s memory, liturgy, and prayer return overwhelmingly to the Exodus. Here lies the disproportion that this article wishes to name: not a contradiction, but a real gap between the psychological force of a founding, dramatic, negative liberation and the quiet, positive, and definitive character of communion. Founding events generate identity in a way that settled, stable states rarely do; a people remembers its liberation more vividly than the ordinary, sunlit days of its peace, just as a married couple remembers its wedding day more vividly than an ordinary Tuesday of married life, although married life is objectively the greater reality.
Part Three — Why the Beginning Attracts More Than the Goal: The Structure of Fallen Desire
Having established that the Temple, not the Exodus, is the true goal within the First Covenant, one question remains unavoidable: why does the beginning of salvation attract the human heart so much more powerfully than its goal? Why does liberation feel more compelling than communion? The answer touches the structure of fallen human nature itself.
The Exodus corresponds to an immediate human need: to be freed from what oppresses us. The Temple corresponds to a much deeper need: to live permanently in God’s presence. But the first is felt immediately, while the second requires an already-transformed heart to appreciate it. The old man in us desires resolution before transformation. He wants the enemy defeated, the chains broken, the obstacle removed; he desires the experience of God’s power because power produces certainty, and certainty reassures a person who is still insecure, still threatened, still centred on himself. The Red Sea opens; Pharaoh is defeated; Israel is safe — the experience is overwhelming, and it can be received almost passively: look what God has done for us.
The Temple asks for something far more demanding. The Exodus reveals God’s power over the enemy; the Temple reveals God’s claim over the whole person. The Exodus means that God acts for me. The Temple means that God asks to live in me, to possess me, reshape me, purify my desires, and make my life his dwelling place. The human heart, left to itself, often prefers the gifts to the Giver.
This preference is already visible within Israel’s own history. After the Exodus, Israel repeatedly longs for visible signs and immediate solutions. At Sinai, immediately after witnessing the glory of God, the people turn to the golden calf (Exodus 32): they want something tangible, something they can see and control, because the invisible God who desires communion is far more difficult to receive than a visible manifestation of his power. The Temple, by contrast, is not primarily a spectacle; it is a place of abiding presence. The words God speaks to Solomon — “my eyes and my heart will be there for all time” (1 Kings 9:3) — offer a far deeper gift than the destruction of an enemy: not merely God’s intervention, but God’s presence. And presence demands a different spiritual capacity than intervention does. An immature faith asks, will God act? A growing faith asks, will God transform me? A mature faith asks, will God unite me to himself?
This is why the Temple is, psychologically, less immediately attractive than the Exodus. The Exodus satisfies the imagination; the Temple demands contemplation. The Exodus is filled with movement, drama, and conflict; the Temple is centred on silence, worship, sacrifice, and communion. The Exodus is an event; the Temple is a state of being. Spiritual maturity is difficult precisely because the human person naturally seeks experiences of God, while God ultimately seeks something much greater: the transformation of the person into a place where he himself can dwell.
St. Paul names exactly this danger in the Corinthians, a community that had received baptism and extraordinary spiritual gifts, yet remained, in his judgment, at the threshold: “I could not speak to you as spiritual people, but rather as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:1). Their problem was not a lack of religious experience; it was that experience had not yet produced transformation. They remained fascinated by manifestations rather than drawn toward maturity — precisely the danger that recurs whenever a Christianity centred on the dramatic moments of God breaking into a life (conversion, emotional encounter, deliverance, a moment of grace) never presses on to ask the Temple’s own question: has God found a dwelling place within us? Has the Holy Spirit transformed our faculties, enlightened our intellect, united our will to his, purified our desires, and turned our prayer into communion rather than the mere asking of favours?
The Exodus destroys the external enemy; this is spectacular. The Temple requires the purification of the internal enemy — the hidden death of self-centredness rather than the dramatic death of Pharaoh; this is crucifying. Yet it is here, and not in the spectacle, that God’s deepest desire lies. The whole movement of salvation history can therefore be described as a movement from power experienced outside us to presence established within us. The Exodus says: God is among us because he has saved us. The Temple says: God is within us because he has transformed us. The first creates the people; the second creates the dwelling place. This is why the imbalance identified throughout this article carries real pastoral weight: a Christian formation that remains primarily fascinated by the Exodus dimension of the faith — rescue, forgiveness, beginning, encounter — risks producing believers who know very well that God saves, without ever being taught that God desires something infinitely greater: to make them his living Temple.
Part Four — Abraham to Solomon: An Open Book of Spiritual Theology
What gives this disproportion its full significance is the discovery that the entire itinerary from Abraham to the dedication of the Temple is not simply a sequence of historical events. Read as a whole, it constitutes an extraordinarily coherent treatise of spiritual theology — a book comparable, in its structure, to St Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle, in which the soul advances through successive mansions towards the centre where God dwells. Israel’s history was written by God himself, in events and not only in words, and it already contains, for anyone with eyes to read it, both the goal of the spiritual life and its principal stages.
1. Abraham — The Call and the Promise
The itinerary begins not with liberation but with a call: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you” (Genesis 12:1). This is the awakening of the soul — the first grace, prior to any purification, in which God draws a person out of what is merely natural and familiar and sets before him a promise not yet possessed. Abraham corresponds to the beginning of the life of faith: the soul does not yet know the road, but it believes the One who calls, and this belief is already “reckoned to him as righteousness” (Genesis 15:6).
2. Exodus — The Negative Liberation
The Exodus is the necessary but purely negative moment: deliverance from slavery, from Egypt, from the dominion of Pharaoh. Spiritually, it corresponds to liberation from sin, from the old man, from the tyranny of disordered attachments. It is dramatic, public, and unforgettable — and, as has been shown, it is precisely this dramatic character that causes it to eclipse, in memory, the goal towards which it is ordered. But Exodus liberates from something; it does not yet establish communion with someone. That is still to come.
3. Sinai — The Law and the Spirit
At Sinai, Israel receives the Law: not a burden imposed from outside for its own sake, but the beginning of a shared life with God, the first form of that interior conformity which the prophets would later announce as a law written on the heart — “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:33) — and which the New Testament identifies with the gift of the Holy Spirit. Sinai corresponds, in the itinerary of the soul, to the formation of conscience and to docility to the Spirit: the liberated soul must now learn to walk according to a rule of life that is not self-invented but received.
4. The Wilderness — Testing and Purification of Trust
Forty years in the desert form the newly liberated people in dependence upon God alone — manna, water from the rock, the pillar of cloud and fire. Spiritually, this is the long and often obscure period in which the soul, having left Egypt, is stripped of the securities it still carried with it, and learns, often through hunger and murmuring, that it does not live by bread alone.
5. The Jordan — A Deep Purification, Crossed with the Ark
The crossing of the Jordan is not a repetition of the Red Sea; it is a distinct and deeper passage. It is the generation born in the desert, not the generation of Egypt, that crosses; and it crosses behind the Ark of the Covenant, which enters the waters first and stands in the midst of the riverbed until all the people have passed (Joshua 3:14–17). This is a purification more interior than the Exodus: no longer an escape from an external oppressor, but a passage accomplished only because the Ark — the sign of God’s own presence — goes before and remains in the midst of the trial until it is complete. Read typologically, this is the moment in the soul’s itinerary that corresponds to a deep, often passive purification of spirit, comparable to what the Carmelite doctors call the night of the spirit — a passage that the soul cannot accomplish by its own strength, but only by remaining close to the true Ark of the Covenant, Mary, who bears within her the living presence of God and who, at the foot of the Cross and throughout the spiritual life, stands in the midst of the soul’s trial so that it may pass through to the other side.
6. The Conquest — Combat against the Seven Nations
Even after crossing the Jordan, the Land is not yet possessed. Israel must dispossess “seven nations more numerous and mightier than yourselves” (Deuteronomy 7:1), including the giants, the Anakim, before whom the first generation had trembled (Numbers 13:33). This stage corresponds to spiritual combat proper: the purification of the passions and the uprooting of deeply fortified habits of self-love, which the soul, already delivered from Egypt and already purified in the crossing of the Jordan, must still confront and overcome, city by city, before it can rest. No stage of the itinerary may be skipped; the giants must be fought.
7. Jerusalem and the Temple — Indwelling and Union
Only at the end of this itinerary is Jerusalem reached, and only under Solomon is the Temple built and dedicated: “the glory of the Lord filled the house of God” (2 Chronicles 5:14; cf. Exodus 40:34). This is the summit — not a further stage of purification, but the goal itself: the stable, permanent, mutual indwelling of God and his people, God’s Eyes and Heart resting perpetually among them (1 Kings 9:3). In the vocabulary of the Carmelite mystics, this is nothing other than the seventh mansion, the spiritual marriage, union with God as the centre of the Interior Castle.
Read in this way, the whole sweep of the Old Testament from Abraham to Solomon is a marvellous, complete, providentially given book of spiritual theology, focused entirely on the essential: the goal — union, indwelling, the Temple — is clear from the outset, and the stages that lead to it are equally clear: the call (Abraham), the liberation (Exodus), the reception of the Law and the Spirit (Sinai), the deep purification crossed with the Ark, who is Mary (the Jordan), the combat against the fortified powers of self-love (the conquest of the seven nations), and finally the indwelling of God, which is union (Jerusalem and the Temple). Israel did not need to invent a spiritual theology; God had already written one, in events, for anyone willing to read the whole book rather than stopping at its most dramatic chapter.
Part Five — The New Testament: A Gateway, Not Yet the Goal
The same pattern, and the same disproportion, reappear in the New Covenant, though with an important refinement. The death and Resurrection of Christ are not simply a starting point in the way the Exodus is a starting point; they are, at once, the decisive saving event and the very gateway into the goal they open. The difficulty is not that we affirm the centrality of the Paschal Mystery — that affirmation is entirely correct — but that we too often remain at the threshold, without entering into what the threshold was built to lead us towards.
St Paul expresses the tension precisely. On the one hand: “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17). On the other: “I am in labour again until Christ is formed in you” (Galatians 4:19). The new life is truly given, and it must still be formed, still grow to its full measure. Baptism buries us with Christ and raises us with him, but Paul’s own language shows that this is ordered towards something further: we are raised “so that… we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4). The goal is not the crossing of the Red Sea; it is the sanctuary that lies beyond it.
And the New Testament names that sanctuary with striking precision, in terms that consciously fulfil Exodus 25:8. “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16); “You are a temple of the living God; as God said, I will live in them and walk among them” (2 Corinthians 6:16). The indwelling that Israel awaited in a building of stone becomes, in the New Covenant, the indwelling of God within the person transformed by grace. St Paul describes the goal, further still, as “attaining to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13), and the Letter to the Hebrews exhorts believers to “make every effort to enter that rest” (Hebrews 4:11) — a rest that is not mere cessation but participation in God’s own life, exactly as Solomon’s Temple was not mere architecture but the dwelling-place of the divine Glory. St Irenaeus summarised the entire trajectory: “The glory of God is man fully alive; and the life of man consists in beholding God” (Against Heresies, IV, 20, 7).
The movement of the New Covenant may therefore be traced as: Christ’s death and Resurrection → baptism → new life → transformation by the Holy Spirit → conformity to Christ → union with God → participation in divine life. Yet contemporary Christian discourse — in preaching, in catechesis, in the ordinary language of parish life — concentrates heavily on the first three elements of this sequence, and gives comparatively little attention to the later ones: purification, growth in virtue, the transformation of the faculties, contemplation, and union. We speak constantly, and rightly, of conversion, forgiveness, and belonging; we speak far less of the stages that lead a converted soul into the abiding presence of God. This is precisely the imbalance identified in the Old Testament, transposed into the New: the Paschal Mystery, remembered every Sunday and enacted in every Mass, occupies in Christian consciousness something of the place the Exodus occupied in Israel’s — while union with God, the true Temple, the true goal, remains far less present to the ordinary believer’s mind, even though it is, objectively, the end for which everything else was given.
The Second Conversion and Becoming a Disciple
This imbalance has a direct pastoral consequence that deserves to be named explicitly: the confusion, still very common today, between the first conversion and the goal itself. The first conversion — the moment a soul turns from sin, receives forgiveness, and begins to believe — is Exodus-like: dramatic, memorable, and rightly cherished. Many believers, and much contemporary catechesis, treat this moment, or its regular liturgical remembrance, as though it were the substance of the Christian life rather than its threshold. One hears a great deal today about “becoming a disciple,” about adherence to Christ, about belonging to a community of faith — and all of this is necessary. But discipleship, in the language of the Gospel and of the whole spiritual tradition, is not a static state achieved once; it is the beginning of a journey with clearly marked stages, of which contemporary discourse says remarkably little.
The spiritual masters have always distinguished, after this first conversion, a second and often more decisive turning: the moment when a soul that already believes, already belongs, and already practises the faith is called to a deeper renunciation, a more radical docility to the Holy Spirit, and the beginning of the true crossing of the Jordan — the passive purification that leads beyond the wilderness of ordinary religious observance into the combat and, ultimately, the indwelling that is union. Without a clear teaching on this second conversion and on what follows it, a Christian can remain indefinitely at the level of Sinai, or even of the wilderness, mistaking fidelity to a rule of life for the goal itself, and never learning to discern the specific shifts by which the Holy Spirit wishes to lead the soul forward, stage by stage, towards the Temple that is union with God. This is why St Teresa of Ávila insists that the soul must journey through the successive mansions of the Interior Castle until it reaches the centre where God dwells: the starting point, however luminous, is not the destination, and a spirituality that does not know its own stages will inevitably move, as sheep without a clear sense of where the shepherd is leading, in circles — or worse, in regression.
Practical Conclusions
- Catechesis and preaching should name the goal — union with God, the indwelling of the Holy Trinity in the soul — explicitly and from the very beginning, rather than presenting the Christian life as an indefinite return to the moment of conversion.
- Formation programmes, whether for the laity, for religious, or for the ordained, should map the stages of the spiritual journey (call, liberation, law and Spirit, deep purification, combat, union) so that souls can recognise where they stand and cooperate with the Holy Spirit’s work at each stage.
- The doctrine of the “second conversion” deserves to be taught explicitly, so that fervent believers are not left to discover on their own, often through confusion or discouragement, that fidelity to a rule of life is not yet union with God.
- Devotion to Mary should be presented, among its other dimensions, precisely as accompaniment through the Jordan-crossing of deep purification: she is the true Ark who goes before the soul and remains in the midst of its trial until the passage is complete.
- Ordinary practices such as Lectio Divina and contemplative prayer should be taught as the normal, daily path by which the indwelling of God — the true Temple — becomes a lived and growing reality, and not reserved to a spiritual elite.
- Liturgical and homiletic emphasis on the Paschal Mystery, entirely legitimate in itself, should be regularly and explicitly connected to its purpose — communion, transformation, the full stature of Christ — so that the memory of the beginning does not eclipse the pursuit of the end.
Conclusion
The Old Testament remembers the Exodus far more than it remembers the Temple, and this disproportion is real, measurable, and rooted not only in the ordinary psychology of memory but in the structure of fallen desire itself: founding, dramatic liberations imprint themselves on the human mind more forcefully than stable and quiet communion, because the old man seeks resolution before transformation, gifts before the Giver, power experienced from without before presence received within — even when that communion is, objectively, the superior reality and the very purpose for which the liberation was granted. Yet the Old Testament itself, read as a whole, corrects this imbalance for anyone willing to trace its entire arc: from Abraham’s call, through the negative liberation of Egypt, the Law and Spirit given at Sinai, the deep purification crossed behind the Ark at the Jordan, the combat against the seven nations, to the glory that finally fills the Temple of Solomon, Israel’s history unfolds as a complete and marvellously ordered treatise of spiritual theology — an Interior Castle written not in words alone but in the very events of a people’s life, in which the goal is never hidden and the stages that lead to it are never omitted.
The New Testament inherits this same structure and, in Christ, brings it to its fulfilment: the Paschal Mystery is the definitive Exodus, and the Church, and each baptised person, is the Temple in which God has chosen to dwell. But the same psychological imbalance that marked Israel’s memory marks the memory of Christians: we recall, celebrate, and preach the death and Resurrection of the Lord, our baptism, and our conversion, far more readily than we pursue, name, and teach the stages that lead from that beginning to the union with God for which it was given. To recover this balance — to hold together, as Scripture itself does, the psychology of memory and the teleology of salvation — is, I believe, one of the most urgent tasks of spiritual theology and of Christian formation today: not to diminish the place of the Exodus or of the Paschal Mystery, both of which remain forever the necessary and glorious threshold, but to restore to full view the Temple that lies beyond it, so that the People of God, and each soul within it, may travel the whole road, and not merely its first and most memorable mile.
Bibliography
Sacred Scripture, cited according to the Revised Standard Version (Catholic Edition).
Jean Khoury, Origen, Homily 27 on the Book of Numbers “Concerning the Stages of the Sons of Israel”.
Jean Khoury, The Promised Land is Union with Christ: The Necessary Christian Reading of the Old Testament
Jean Khoury, The Spiritual Journey In 11 Diagrams (Or Read The Book)
Jean Khoury, The Spiritual Journey and the School’s Formation
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 1, a. 4.
Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, IV, 20, 7.
John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, II, 29.
Teresa of Ávila, The Interior Castle.
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