Revelation, Language, Apprenticeship and the Recovery of a Theology of Spiritual Formation
Jean Khoury
Summary: Human language exhibits remarkable statistical regularities. Across many languages and corpora, frequent words tend to occur much more often than rare words; vocabulary grows more slowly than the length of a text; frequently used words tend to be shorter; and linguistic systems can be understood, at least in part, as balancing the effort required by speaker and hearer. These observations, associated particularly with Zipf and subsequent quantitative linguistics, reveal something important about communication: language develops under pressures of economy, intelligibility and use.
But communication is not a single human activity. There is a profound difference between communicating information and initiating someone into a practice. One communicative environment resembles a stream of water: thoughts, concepts and propositions flow from one person to another. Another resembles a workshop: the master demonstrates, the apprentice takes the tool, attempts the movement, fails, receives correction, tries again and gradually acquires a capacity that becomes his own. The vocabulary appropriate to these two environments is therefore not identical. The first is principally propositional and explanatory; the second is operative, demonstrative and procedural.
This distinction has major consequences for Christian formation. Catechesis principally communicates the content and intelligibility of the Christian faith. Mystagogy, and more broadly what may be called initiation into spiritual life, must go further: it must initiate the person into the actual operations of Christian life. It must teach not merely what prayer, faith, discernment, contemplation or charity are, but how the Christian begins to pray, believe, discern, contemplate and love.
This leads to a fundamental question for adult formation: “What is the minimum communication necessary for the apprentice progressively to perform the act independently?” The goal is not to communicate everything the teacher knows, but to provide what is necessary at each stage for the learner to perform the next movement himself, under appropriate guidance and discernment.
This insight also opens a deeper theological question. Has theology, particularly in its academic and university development from the Middle Ages onwards, become disproportionately a theology of propositions about God, at the expense of theology ordered towards the transformation of the person? If theology is the prism through which Christians perceive revelation and Christian life, then the form of theology we construct inevitably shapes the form of Christianity we learn to see and live.
The recovery required is therefore not a rejection of dogmatic, biblical, historical or systematic theology, but an integral theology in which theological knowledge is ordered towards communion with the Triune God and the transformation of the person in charity. The Imitation of Christ expresses the fundamental criterion with extraordinary force: “What good does it do to speak learnedly about the Trinity if, lacking humility, you displease the Trinity?”
At the deepest level, however, Christian spiritual formation is not simply an educational technique. The ultimate Master is the Holy Spirit. St John of the Cross describes God as not merely giving the soul his love but teaching the soul how to love, “as if He put an instrument in its hand, taught it the use thereof, and played upon it together with the soul”. The external teacher therefore has a subordinate task: to lead the disciple towards docility to the interior Master, who teaches the movement of divine love from within.
The recovery of Spiritual Theology is consequently a recovery of a theology capable not merely of speaking about the Christian mystery, but of initiating the Christian into its lived reality.
Introduction
There is a deceptively simple question at the beginning of any theology of communication: What exactly happens when one person communicates something to another?
At first sight, the answer seems obvious. One person has something to say; he puts it into words; another person hears or reads those words; the words carry meaning from one mind to another. Communication is therefore imagined as a movement, almost as a stream. Something flows from the speaker towards the listener.
This model is indispensable. Human beings must communicate propositions, explanations, facts, arguments and distinctions. Revelation itself has a communicative dimension: God speaks, reveals, teaches and communicates truth. Theology must therefore possess the vocabulary necessary to articulate what has been revealed.
Yet this model becomes insufficient when we move from knowing something to learning how to do something.
A person can explain how a violin is played without being able to play it. A person can describe swimming without being able to swim. A person can give a magnificent account of contemplation without having taught another person how to enter into contemplative prayer. A person can explain the virtue of faith without necessarily teaching another person how to make an act of faith. At this point, communication enters another world.
The image is no longer a stream but a workshop. The master sits with the apprentice. The tools are present. The master demonstrates. The apprentice tries. He gets it wrong. The master observes. He corrects the movement. The apprentice tries again. The master perhaps places his hand over the apprentice’s hand and guides the movement. Eventually the apprentice begins to feel what the master was showing him. The movement becomes interiorised. Finally, he can perform it himself. The question has changed. The lecturer asks: “What does this person need to know?” The master asks: “What is the minimum communication necessary for this apprentice progressively to perform the act independently?” That question provides an important key not only to adult education but to Spiritual Theology.
For Spiritual Theology contains a dimension that cannot be satisfied by describing spiritual realities. It must teach the Christian how to enter them. It must contain a genuine how-to dimension. The Christian does not merely need to know about prayer; he needs to learn to pray. He does not merely need to know about faith; he needs to believe. He does not merely need to know about discernment; he needs to discern. He does not merely need to know about charity; he needs to learn how to love. This distinction, once seen, illuminates several apparently separate phenomena: the statistical economy of ordinary language, the remarkably restricted vocabulary of St. John’s Gospel, the concrete and symbolic language of Pseudo-Dionysius, the distinction between catechesis and mystagogy, the development of adult education, the nature of apprenticeship, the historical development of university theology, and the teaching of the Holy Spirit in St. John of the Cross. They are not identical phenomena, and one must not force them into a single explanatory theory. But they converge upon a profound question: What happens to language when its purpose changes from communicating knowledge to initiating a person into participation in a reality?
I. The economy of language: from Zipf to the problem of communication
One of the most striking discoveries of quantitative linguistics is that language, despite its extraordinary complexity, displays recurrent statistical regularities. The best known is Zipf’s law of word frequency. If the words in a sufficiently large corpus are ranked according to frequency, the frequency of the word at rank approximately follows a power-law relationship: with often lying near 1, although the precise value and behaviour vary according to corpus and methodology. Zipf’s law is therefore a powerful empirical regularity, but it should not be stated as though every language mechanically obeyed one identical equation under every circumstance. Modern quantitative linguistics treats it as an approximate and robust pattern rather than a simplistic universal formula. This produces a striking consequence. The most frequent word occurs vastly more often than many of the words further down the frequency ranking. A relatively small core vocabulary does an enormous amount of communicative work, while a very large number of words occur only rarely. These rare words include hapax legomena, words occurring only once in a given corpus. Their abundance is not an accidental curiosity but a predictable feature of large textual corpora associated with highly uneven word-frequency distributions.
A second regularity concerns vocabulary growth. As a text becomes longer, its vocabulary does not increase at the same rate. The number of distinct words grows sublinearly with the total number of words. This is generally expressed through Heaps’ law:
where is the number of distinct lexical types in a corpus of tokens and . Thus, as we continue reading, we continue encountering new words, but at a progressively slower rate.
A third striking phenomenon is the law of abbreviation: frequently used words tend to be shorter than less frequently used words. This relationship has been found across a remarkably wide range of languages. Research has refined the original Zipfian account, however, showing that contextual informativity can sometimes predict word length better than raw frequency alone. The important point is that linguistic systems exhibit strong pressures towards economical coding.
The fourth point concerns the relationship between speaker and hearer. Zipf proposed a principle of least effort, and later work by Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho and Ricard V. Solé formalised a model in which communication can be understood as balancing the effort of the speaker and the effort of the hearer. A system optimised only for the speaker could become extremely economical but ambiguous; a system optimised only for the hearer could become excessively elaborate. The interesting point is the equilibrium between the two.
These observations provide a useful conceptual starting point. Language is not an unlimited accumulation of words. It is an organised system in which repetition, frequency, economy, ambiguity, information and communicative effort interact. But there is an important limitation. The speaker-listener equilibrium describes one kind of communication. It does not exhaust communication. It describes communication in which the primary task is to get something understood. What happens when the primary task is not simply to make someone understand, but to make it possible for someone to do? That is where we must leave the stream and enter the workshop.
II. Two communicative worlds: the stream and the workshop
The vocabulary of communication is not identical to the vocabulary of craftsmanship because the human activity being served is different. In one environment, something is being said. In the other, something is being done.
The first can be pictured as a stream of water. The teacher possesses information, and language carries it towards the learner. The learner receives it, processes it, understands it and perhaps memorises it. The communication may be extraordinarily sophisticated, but the learner can remain fundamentally passive. He can listen, take notes, reproduce definitions, pass an examination and still never have acquired the capacity which the teacher possesses.
The second environment is a workshop. The master does not merely possess information; he possesses a craft. The apprentice must acquire a movement. He watches. He tries. Teaching is tested through the attempt itself. The apprentice experiences his failure. He checks his action with the master. The master corrects him. The apprentice tries again. Gradually, the movement ceases to be something merely observed from outside and becomes something he can perform.
The difference can therefore be expressed as a distinction between propositional/explanatory language and operative/ demonstrative/ procedural language. Propositional language tells us what something is, what it means, why it matters, what its causes are and how it relates to other realities. It moves thoughts. Operative language directs an action. It tells the apprentice what to do, what to observe, where to place his attention, what to change, when to stop, when to begin again. It does not merely carry a thought; it guides a movement. The master might eventually say only, “Again.” Or, “Remain.” Or, “Do not force it.” Or, “Look.” Or, “Wait.” Outside the workshop these words appear almost empty. Inside the workshop they may contain an enormous amount of meaning. Why? Because the apprentice and the master now share a world of practice. “Again” may mean: I have seen exactly where your movement failed; you already know the general principle; do not return to the explanation; repeat the movement and correct this particular element.
The language has become compressed because experience has become shared. This is crucial. A reduction in vocabulary does not necessarily indicate a reduction in meaning. Sometimes the opposite is true. As the shared experiential context increases, fewer words can carry more meaning. The master’s word becomes dense because the apprentice has acquired the environment in which that word makes sense. The communication has therefore moved from the transfer of information towards the formation of competence.
III. From teaching about an art to teaching the art
The difference becomes clearer if we consider ordinary crafts. A person may write an entire book about making a violin. The book may explain wood, resonance, proportions, varnish, strings and technique. Yet the book itself cannot guarantee that the reader can make a violin. Likewise, someone can write an excellent scientific account of swimming. But reading it does not cause the reader to swim. The distinction is not between good and bad explanation. The explanation may be perfect. The problem is that knowledge about an act is not identical with the capacity to perform the act. This distinction is fundamental for Spiritual Theology. We can talk for hours about the virtue of faith without teaching someone how to make an act of faith. We can explain contemplation without necessarily initiating someone into contemplative prayer. We can explain discernment without necessarily teaching someone to discern. We can explain Lectio Divina without necessarily bringing someone to the point at which he can sit before Scripture, listen, respond, remain, recognise what is happening and allow the Word to act within him. We can explain charity without teaching the person how to love.
The problem is therefore not that theological explanation is unnecessary. It is that explanation belongs to only one category of communication. There is another category whose purpose is initiation into practice. The distinction can be expressed in a simple progression: To tell. To show. To invite. To practise. To correct. To repeat. To interiorise. To perform independently. And, eventually, to transmit the practice to another. This is the movement of apprenticeship.
IV. Revelation is more than the communication of propositions
The same distinction becomes decisive when we turn to revelation. Christian revelation certainly contains truths. God reveals himself, and revelation has an intelligible content. The Church therefore rightly teaches, defines and articulates what has been revealed. But revelation is not exhausted by propositions.
God does not merely tell humanity things about himself. In Christ, God gives himself and calls human beings into communion with himself. The Gospel’s purpose is therefore not exhausted when the reader understands its information. The Gospel seeks a response. This is particularly clear in John’s Gospel. At the end of the Gospel, John explains why he has written: “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name” (Jn 20:31). The communication has an intended operation. The Gospel is written that the reader may believe. The purpose of communication is therefore not simply that the reader should know what John knows. It is that the reader should enter into the reality to which John’s testimony points. This is why the Johannine vocabulary becomes so suggestive.
John’s Gospel contains a remarkably restricted vocabulary. One modern Greek handbook notes that the Gospel contains 15,635 words but only 1,011 different words, compared with 1,345 in Mark, 1,691 in Matthew and 2,055 in Luke. C. K. Barrett observed that, despite its small vocabulary, “the reader never receives the impression of an ill-equipped writer at a loss for the right word”. The point should not be turned into a simplistic claim that John writes simply because he lacks vocabulary. His apparently simple language can conceal extraordinarily complex theological and syntactical structures. Nor does statistical simplicity by itself prove a theological intention. Yet the phenomenon is nevertheless striking.
With a relatively small linguistic toolbox, John communicates some of the most profound theology in the New Testament: the relation of Father and Son, the identity of Christ, the Word made flesh, the gift of the Spirit, eternal life, divine indwelling and the relationship between Christ and the believer. John’s language repeatedly returns to a relatively small number of fundamental words and actions: come, see, follow, believe, remain, know, love, receive, keep. The movement is therefore not simply from more vocabulary to less vocabulary. It can also be read as a movement from discourse about reality towards language that facilitates participation in reality.
V. The remarkable leap from “faith” to “believe”
This becomes particularly striking in the Johannine treatment of faith. John’s Gospel does not use the noun πίστις, “faith”, whereas the verb πιστεύω, “to believe”, occurs nearly one hundred times. Gerald O’Collins has drawn particular attention to this feature, observing that “the verb ‘to believe (pisteuein)’ occurs nearly one hundred times, whereas the noun ‘faith (pistis)’ never occurs”. He argues that believing in John is appropriately understood as the ongoing relationship of the disciples to Christ himself. One must be careful here. It would be linguistically excessive to argue that every noun necessarily expresses a static reality while every verb expresses a dynamic reality. Grammatical categories do not map so mechanically onto theology. Nevertheless, John’s choice remains theologically suggestive. John does not construct his Gospel around a technical discourse about “faith” as an abstract object. He repeatedly places the reader before the act of believing. This is a leap. The reader is not merely being asked to acquire a concept called “faith”. He is being brought towards an act: believe. John 20:31 itself uses the verb in precisely this purposive way: the Gospel is written so that the reader may believe and, believing, have life. This is very close to the language of the workshop. The Gospel does not merely say, “Here is an account of believing.” It says, in effect: Now believe. That does not reduce theology to technique. Rather, it reveals that Christian communication has an intrinsically formative dimension. The Word seeks to produce a response. The movement from noun to verb is therefore not, by itself, a complete theology of faith. But it provides a particularly illuminating instance of a larger principle: Christian language reaches its fulfilment when it produces participation in the reality it communicates.
VI. From John to Pseudo-Dionysius: the economy of theological language
This helps us return to another striking phenomenon: Pseudo-Dionysius. In The Divine Names, Pseudo-Dionysius can speak of God as “sun, star—fire—water—spirit—dew—cloud—self-hewn stone and rock—all things existing—and not one of things existing”. The vocabulary is astonishingly concrete. Water. Fire. Light. Cloud. Rock. Stone. Yet this concrete vocabulary occurs within one of the most sophisticated theological treatments of divine transcendence in the Christian tradition. Pseudo-Dionysius simultaneously insists that God is beyond every name and that God is celebrated through many names drawn from created things. The created names do not contain God; they point beyond themselves towards the divine Cause. Something similar happens in The Mystical Theology. The closer Dionysius moves towards the mystery of God, the more language is stripped away. The movement proceeds through negation until the intellect enters a darkness beyond conceptual grasp. The economy of language here is not simply statistical economy. We must not confuse a linguistic phenomenon such as Zipf’s law with a theological explanation of mystical theology. The relationship is analogical. But it is a fruitful analogy. There can be a movement:
many words → fewer words → simple words → symbolic words → negation → silence.
The word becomes smaller precisely because the reality towards which it points becomes immeasurable. The final silence of mystical theology is not the discovery that God has become less intelligible in the sense of being less real or less knowable in every respect. It is the recognition that finite concepts cannot contain the superessential mystery. The language becomes economical because the theological task has changed. The theologian is no longer attempting simply to construct a larger conceptual object. He is being brought towards participation in mystery.
VII. From the river to the workshop: the decisive distinction for adult education
At this point we can return to education. The field of adult education is particularly relevant because adults are not simply children with more years. They arrive with experience, existing knowledge, habits, questions, responsibilities and motivations. Malcolm Knowles famously defined andragogy as “the art and science of helping adults learn”. His account emphasises several characteristics of adult learners: they tend to be relatively self-directed; they possess accumulated experience that can become a resource for learning; they value learning that connects with everyday life; they often prefer problem-centred approaches; and internal motivation plays an important role. These principles already move us away from a purely transmissive model. But even andragogy does not go far enough for our present question. We need to distinguish between adult learning in general and adult apprenticeship into a practice. Experiential learning, for example, emphasises the relation between experience, reflection, conceptualisation and active experimentation. Kolb’s model describes learning as a cycle involving concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualisation and active experimentation. This is highly relevant to spiritual formation because the Christian cannot simply accumulate concepts. He must bring teaching into contact with actual experience and then learn to interpret and act upon that experience.
Similarly, situated learning and communities of practice, particularly associated with Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, recover the importance of learning through participation in a practice. Their concept of “legitimate peripheral participation” describes how newcomers enter a community of practitioners and gradually move towards fuller participation in its practices. The apprentice therefore learns not merely by receiving information but by entering a world of practice. Reflective practice adds another important dimension. Donald Schön argued that professional practice cannot always be reduced to the application of previously formulated theory and technique. His concept of reflection-in-action describes the practitioner thinking within the practice itself, responding to the particularity of the situation rather than simply applying abstract rules. Transformative learning adds still another dimension, particularly relevant to adults. Mezirow’s work emphasises critical reflection upon assumptions and perspectives, rather than merely the uncritical assimilation of information. Taken together, these educational developments reveal something important: adult learning cannot be adequately described as the reception of information. The adult learner must experience, reflect, practise, test, correct, integrate and transform. Yet Christian spiritual formation adds something that educational theory by itself cannot provide. The Christian is not merely learning a skill. He is learning how to live before God. Grace cannot be produced by a pedagogical technique. The Holy Spirit cannot be reduced to an educational mechanism. Spiritual formation must therefore appropriate the insights of adult education without reducing spiritual life to psychology or technique.
VIII. Catechesis and Initiation into Spiritual Life
This is where the distinction between catechesis and mystagogy, or more broadly initiation into spiritual life, becomes especially illuminating. Catechesis has an indispensable explanatory and doctrinal task. It teaches the Christian faith in its integrity. It introduces adults to Sacred Scripture, prayer, doctrine, morality, sacramental life and the rational foundations of faith. The Church’s own documents on adult catechesis, however, already point beyond a purely informational model. The General Directory for Catechesis states that adult catechesis should introduce adults to a faith-filled reading of Scripture and the practice of prayer, and identifies retreats and spiritual direction among the means by which life in Christ is developed. The earlier Vatican document Adult Catechesis in the Christian Community is equally significant. It stresses that adult catechesis must be dynamic and relevant, attentive to the concrete questions and circumstances of adult life, and gives “special attention” to “teaching adults how to pray”. That final phrase is particularly important. Teaching adults how to pray already takes us from the vocabulary of explanation into the vocabulary of apprenticeship. It is one thing to explain prayer. It is another thing to teach a person how to pray. And the distinction is not merely methodological. It corresponds to two different stages of Christian formation. Catechesis asks: What does the Church believe? Initiation into spiritual life asks: How does the Christian begin to live what the Church believes? Catechesis says: This is what prayer is. Initiation says: Come. Let us pray. Now you pray. Catechesis explains faith. Initiation teaches the act of believing. Catechesis explains discernment. Initiation accompanies the person while he learns to discern. Catechesis explains the commandments. Initiation teaches the person how obedience becomes concrete in his actual life. Catechesis explains charity. Initiation brings the person into the workshop in which he learns to love. This is why “initiation into spiritual life” can sometimes be a more useful expression for the wider task than “mystagogy”. Mystagogy has a rich and precise historical meaning, particularly in relation to sacramental initiation. But the broader formation of an adult Christian into the actual operations of spiritual life requires a category that extends beyond sacramental explanation: apprenticeship in Christian living. The US bishops express this principle remarkably clearly. Our Hearts Were Burning Within Us says that adult faith formation must actively involve participants in their own journey: “passive listening is never enough; the goal is always conversion.” It explicitly calls for respect for adult experience and active participation. The distinction is therefore ecclesially grounded as well as educationally grounded.
IX. The master does not merely speak: he demonstrates
We can now return to the central image of the workshop. In craftsmanship, the master possesses a knowledge that cannot be exhausted by verbal description. He knows how to move. His knowledge is partly embodied in the movement itself. The apprentice therefore needs to see the master act. This gives us another dimension of spiritual pedagogy: witness. The spiritual teacher cannot teach prayer merely by talking about prayer. His own manner of praying, his reverence before Scripture, his way of discerning, his manner of treating suffering, his freedom from self-interest and his charity towards others can become part of the pedagogical environment. The teacher therefore communicates at several levels simultaneously. He communicates propositions. He interprets experience. He demonstrates practice. He accompanies practice. He corrects practice. He embodies the reality towards which the teaching points. This is why formation cannot be reduced to lectures, however excellent those lectures may be. The master does not merely tell the apprentice what the movement should be. He shows him. Then the apprentice tries. Then the master corrects. Then the apprentice tries again. Eventually the master’s intervention becomes smaller. This gives us a pedagogical principle of enormous importance: The teacher should communicate not everything he knows about the act, but what the apprentice needs at each stage in order progressively to perform the act without him. This is not minimalism for its own sake. It is minimum sufficient communication. The teacher must provide enough to prevent serious error, enough to make the next movement possible, enough to illuminate what has been experienced and enough to correct what needs correction. But he should not mistake the transmission of everything he knows for the formation of the apprentice.
X. “Learning to fish”: the goal is freedom, not dependence
The familiar image of teaching someone to fish is therefore particularly apt. If the teacher always supplies the fish, the learner remains dependent. If the teacher gives the learner a fishing rod, puts bait on the hook, shows him how to cast, watches him, corrects his technique and eventually allows him to fish alone, the learner acquires a capacity. This is precisely the difference between feeding someone with conclusions and forming someone capable of seeking the truth and acting within it. The principle becomes even more important in spiritual formation. The goal is not to make the Christian permanently dependent upon the teacher’s explanations. Nor is the goal to make him spiritually autonomous. The goal is freedom in docility. The Christian becomes capable of praying, discerning, reading Scripture, making acts of faith and charity, examining his life and responding to God’s grace personally. Yet he remains within the Church, within Scripture, within sacramental life, within the Tradition, and where appropriate within spiritual accompaniment. The external teacher’s hand can therefore progressively withdraw without the person being abandoned. The teacher has succeeded when the disciple no longer needs the teacher to mediate every movement. But this leads to the decisive theological qualification. In spiritual life, the external teacher is not the ultimate Master.
XI. St John of the Cross: the guiding hand of the Holy Spirit
The image of the guiding hand acquires its deepest meaning in St. John of the Cross. The master of spiritual life is ultimately the Holy Spirit. St. John describes the action of God in the soul in terms that are extraordinarily close to the workshop analogy. In his exposition of the Spiritual Canticle, when speaking of the highest action of divine love, he describes God as communicating his own love to the soul and teaching the soul how to love. The striking image is that of an instrument placed into the soul’s hands: “It is as if He put an instrument in its hand, taught it the use thereof, and played upon it together with the soul.” The image is even more profound than an ordinary master-apprentice relationship. The master does not simply demonstrate an external movement and then leave the apprentice to imitate it. God communicates the very love by which the soul learns to love. St. John explains that God not only teaches the soul to love him purely, but enables it to love with a strength derived from God’s own transforming action. In the state of spiritual marriage, the soul is united with the very Master of love. Here the pedagogical analogy reaches its theological fulfilment. The spiritual director may explain. The theologian may clarify. The teacher may demonstrate. The Church may provide the sacramental and ecclesial environment. But the Holy Spirit must teach from within. The real apprenticeship of spiritual life is therefore an apprenticeship to the interior Master. The external master is successful not when the disciple becomes dependent upon him, but when the disciple becomes increasingly capable of recognising and following the movement of the Holy Spirit. And this is why the “guiding hand” cannot finally mean the hand of the human teacher. It is the hand of the Holy Spirit.
XII. The movement of love: the heart of Christian formation
What, then, is the movement that the Holy Spirit teaches? It is love. This brings us to the First Commandment and the whole structure of Christian existence. The ultimate goal is not merely to acquire information about charity. It is to become capable of loving God with one’s whole heart, soul, mind and strength and one’s neighbour as oneself. The Christian life is therefore an apprenticeship in love. This also gives new depth to the language of John. The Gospel speaks of believing, but believing leads to life. It speaks of knowing, but knowledge leads towards communion. It speaks of remaining, but remaining is remaining in Christ’s love. It speaks of loving, and the commandment of love becomes the practical form of abiding in Christ. The Christian does not merely study the vocabulary of love. He learns the movement of love. The Holy Spirit teaches that movement from within. Spiritual Theology therefore has a unique role. It must articulate the structure of this learning: how grace acts, how the person cooperates, how prayer develops, how virtue grows, how purification takes place, how discernment matures, how the person passes from dependence upon external supports towards greater docility to God. This is why the language of Spiritual Theology must sometimes become extremely practical. It must be able to say: Begin here. Remain here. Do not force this. Return to the Word. Listen. Wait. Respond. Notice what is happening. Discern. Try again. These are not substitutes for theology. They are what theology becomes when it enters the workshop.
XIII. Theology as a prism
We can now approach the more radical question: what does this mean for theology itself? It would be too simple to say that university theology is bad, or that academic theology should be replaced by practical spirituality. Theology requires intellectual discipline. Scripture must be studied rigorously. Doctrine must be articulated precisely. Historical development must be investigated. Philosophical categories must be examined. The Church needs intellectual theology. The problem arises when a particular historical form of theological activity becomes identified with theology as such. The medieval university gave theology a highly developed scientific and disputational form. This achievement produced enormous intellectual benefits. Yet it also carried a risk: theology could increasingly be organised as a science whose immediate object was the intellectual understanding of divine realities rather than the formation of the Christian person in communion with God. The question is therefore not whether university theology is legitimate. The question is: Is university theology sufficient as the paradigm of theology? And if it is not sufficient, what has been lost? The answer may be precisely the distinction between theology about spiritual life and theology that forms spiritual life. When theology is principally conceived as an academic discipline, its natural language becomes propositional and explanatory. It defines. It distinguishes. It argues. It analyses. It establishes relationships between concepts. All of this is legitimate. But if this becomes the dominant theological prism, then Christianity itself begins to appear primarily as a system of propositions. The prism determines what we see. If the theological prism presents Christianity chiefly as a body of truths, then the Christian learns to approach the Gospel principally as something to understand. If the prism includes formation, practice, experience, discernment and participation, then the Christian begins to perceive the Gospel as something to enter and live. The theological prism therefore has consequences for Christian existence. The question becomes not merely: “What theology do we teach?” but: “What kind of Christian does this theology make possible?”
XIV. The danger of an impoverished Christian vision
This allows us to formulate the critique more carefully. The problem with a predominantly propositional theological culture is not necessarily that its propositions are false. The problem is that truth detached from its formative telos can become spiritually sterile. A Christian may know an enormous amount about the Trinity and yet fail to live in communion with the Trinity. He may know the doctrine of grace and remain unable to cooperate with grace. He may know the theology of prayer and rarely pray. He may know the theology of charity and remain uncharitable. He may know the doctrine of the Holy Spirit and fail to become docile to the Spirit. This is the paradox captured so powerfully by the Imitation of Christ: “What good does it do to speak learnedly about the Trinity if, lacking humility, you displease the Trinity?” The point is not that learning is worthless. The text immediately places knowledge within a hierarchy of purpose. It continues by insisting that holiness does not arise from intellectual knowledge alone and says: “I would rather feel contrition than know how to define it.” The question is therefore one of order. What is theology for? If theology is ultimately ordered towards communion with God, then a theology that does not contribute to that communion is incomplete, however sophisticated its conceptual apparatus may be. This is why a theology of spiritual formation is not merely another specialised branch of theology. It is, in a profound sense, the first form of theology needed by the Christian. The Christian first needs to learn how to live the mystery he has received. Only then does the immense development of theological knowledge find its proper orientation.
XV. The first theology: learning to please the Trinity
The question posed by the Imitation of Christ can therefore become the criterion of theological education. What is the point of discussing the Trinity if I do not learn to please the Trinity? What is the point of discussing Christ if I do not learn to follow Christ? What is the point of discussing the Holy Spirit if I do not learn to become docile to the Holy Spirit? What is the point of discussing charity if I do not learn to love? Theology must not merely answer: “Who is God?” It must also lead towards: “How do I live before God?” Trinitarian theology tells us who God is. Spiritual formation asks how the Christian lives as one created by the Father, redeemed by the Son and transformed by the Holy Spirit. Christology tells us who Christ is. Spiritual formation asks how Christ is followed and formed in the Christian. Pneumatology tells us who the Holy Spirit is. Spiritual formation asks how the Christian recognises and follows the Spirit’s action. The theology of grace tells us about God’s action. Spiritual formation asks how the person cooperates with grace. The theology of charity explains charity. Spiritual formation teaches the movement of love. This is not an opposition between theology and spirituality. It is an insistence that theology reach its telos.
XVI. Theological consequences
The first theoretical consequence is therefore that Spiritual Theology cannot be treated merely as applied theology. It is not simply systematic theology followed by a practical appendix. It has its own object, method and communicative mode: the study and communication of the life of grace as it is actually lived, developed, purified and brought towards its fulfilment.
The second consequence is that theology needs to recover a distinction between knowledge of a reality and participation in a reality. Christianity cannot be adequately understood if the epistemological dimension is separated from the participatory dimension.
The third consequence is that theology requires an integral architecture. Dogmatic, biblical, moral, liturgical, historical, spiritual and pastoral theology should not become isolated compartments. They must retain their proper methods while remaining oriented towards the one mystery of God and the transformation of the human person.
The fourth consequence concerns theological language. There is a legitimate propositional language of theology, but there must also be a language capable of interpretation, discernment, initiation and practice. Theology requires not only explanatory vocabulary but operative vocabulary.
The fifth consequence is that the Gospel itself must be read not only as a body of revealed information but as a performative communication. It addresses the reader and seeks a response. John’s “that you may believe” is paradigmatic.
The sixth consequence is that theological education must recover the distinction between knowing what and knowing how, while recognising that Christian spiritual life involves something beyond both: knowing how to receive and cooperate with God’s action.
The seventh consequence is that theology is indeed a prism. Its categories mediate how Christians perceive revelation. A theological culture that foregrounds propositions will tend to produce a propositional Christian imagination; a theology that foregrounds participation will make participation more visible and teachable.
The eighth consequence is that the history of theology must be revisited without caricature. The development of scholastic and university theology should not be rejected; its extraordinary achievements must be honoured. But we must ask what happened when one form of theological knowledge became normative for the whole theological enterprise, and what dimensions of the older Christian tradition became less visible as a result.
The ninth consequence is that the recovery of Spiritual Theology is not a retreat from intellectual theology. It is an attempt to restore the telos of theological intelligence: wisdom ordered towards communion.
The tenth consequence is perhaps the deepest: the ultimate object of spiritual formation is not simply a set of practices but charity itself. The person is being taught, under grace, to love with a love increasingly conformed to God’s own love.
XVII. Pedagogical consequences
The first pedagogical consequence is that a spiritual formation programme must distinguish clearly between content objectives and formative objectives. It is not enough to ask, “What should the student know at the end of this lesson?” We must also ask: “What should the student be able to do?” And eventually: “What should the student be able to do without me?” This is the practical formulation of the principle: “What is the minimum communication necessary for the apprentice progressively to perform the act independently?”
The second consequence is that every practical subject should contain a movement from explanation towards practice. A lesson on Lectio Divina should not stop with a definition of Lectio Divina. It should lead into Lectio Divina. A lesson on prayer should include prayer. A lesson on discernment should include actual discernment. A lesson on acts of faith should provide opportunities for making acts of faith.
The third consequence is the importance of demonstration. The teacher must sometimes show the practice rather than merely describe it.
The fourth is the importance of guided practice. Students must be allowed to try while the teacher observes and corrects.
The fifth is the importance of feedback. Failure is not necessarily the opposite of learning. In apprenticeship, failure reveals where the movement has not yet been acquired.
The sixth is the importance of reflection upon experience. The learner must learn not only to perform an action but to understand what happened when he performed it.
The seventh is progressive reduction of external support. At the beginning, the teacher gives more explanation and structure. As competence grows, the teacher intervenes less. This is how the apprentice becomes free.
The eighth is integration into life. Spiritual practices must not remain exercises performed in a classroom. They must become part of the person’s ordinary Christian existence.
The ninth is accompaniment and discernment. Particularly in spiritual life, independent practice does not mean unexamined individualism. The learner must develop the capacity to recognise what is happening and when further guidance is required.
The tenth is witness. The teacher himself becomes part of the pedagogical environment. His way of praying, speaking, listening, discerning and loving communicates something that cannot be transmitted by propositions alone.
XVIII. Practical consequences for Spiritual Theology
This framework suggests that every course in Spiritual Theology should be examined through a simple but demanding question: Where is the workshop? If the whole course consists of explanations, there may be no workshop. Where does the student actually pray? Where does the student actually read Scripture prayerfully? Where does the student actually make an act of faith? Where does the student actually practise discernment? Where does the student actually examine his response to grace? Where does the student receive correction? Where does he try again? Where does he learn to recognise his own errors? Where does he gradually become capable of acting without the teacher? And finally: Where does he learn to recognise the action of the Holy Spirit within? This does not mean that every lesson must become a practical exercise. Some theological content requires sustained intellectual exposition. But the whole curriculum must have a relationship to formation.
A course on the theology of prayer should eventually produce people who pray. A course on Scripture should eventually produce people who can enter Scripture prayerfully. A course on spiritual discernment should produce people capable of discerning. A course on spiritual growth should help people recognise and cooperate with growth. A course on St. Teresa or St. John of the Cross should not merely transmit information about mystical theology; it should help the student acquire the categories by which spiritual experience can be understood, discerned and lived faithfully.
The teacher therefore needs to ask, lesson by lesson: What must I explain? What must I demonstrate? What must the student try? What must I observe? What must I correct? What must the student eventually be able to do alone? And finally: What must I stop doing so that the student can begin doing it himself? That final question is the question of the master.
XIX. The deepest practical consequence: teach the person to meet the Master
There is, however, one final correction that protects this entire pedagogy from becoming merely technical. The teacher of spiritual life must never become the substitute for God. The purpose of spiritual formation is not to create dependence upon a charismatic teacher, a course, a method or even a particular spiritual vocabulary. The purpose is to place the Christian in a relationship of increasing docility to Christ and the Holy Spirit. This is why St John of the Cross is so important. The spiritual teacher may place his hand over the apprentice’s hand. But ultimately another Hand must take over. The Holy Spirit teaches the soul from within. The soul gradually becomes capable of recognising the movement. The external master becomes less necessary. The interior Master becomes more clearly recognised. And even here “independence” must be carefully redefined. The Christian does not become independent of God. He becomes increasingly free to cooperate with God. This is the Christian form of mastery. The mature Christian does not say, “I no longer need the Master.” He says, rather: “I have learned to recognise his movement.” And the movement he recognises is love.
XX. Towards an Integral Theology
We can now return to the initial question about the relationship between theology, communication and spiritual formation. The fundamental problem is not that theology became intellectual. Christian theology must be intellectual. Nor is the solution to abandon academic theology. The deeper problem is that one communicative mode can become so dominant that it obscures another. The stream can become so large that we forget the workshop. The explanation can become so extensive that we forget the movement. The vocabulary can become so sophisticated that we forget the act. The theological system can become so elaborate that we forget the person for whom theology exists. An integral theology therefore needs both worlds. It needs the stream: Scripture, doctrine, conceptual clarification, historical research, metaphysics, systematic reasoning and theological argument. But it also needs the workshop: prayer, contemplation, Lectio Divina, discernment, virtue, purification, conversion, accompaniment, practice and transformation. And the two must not remain disconnected. The stream should lead towards the workshop. The workshop should illuminate the stream. Doctrine should become life. Experience should be interpreted by truth. Practice should be purified by theology. Theology should be tested by its capacity to serve communion with God. This is not a reduction of theology to experience. Experience requires discernment and theological interpretation. Nor is it a reduction of spiritual life to doctrine. Doctrine requires embodiment in Christian existence. The goal is integration.
Conclusion: from speaking about God to learning to live in God
We began with a simple observation about language. Words do not all behave in the same way. Frequent words tend to become economical. Vocabulary does not grow indefinitely in proportion to the length of a text. Language balances communicative efficiency and intelligibility. The most frequently used expressions can become extraordinarily small while carrying enormous communicative weight. We then discovered that there are different worlds of communication. One is the world of the stream: thoughts move from speaker to listener. The learner can remain relatively passive, receiving and memorising. The other is the world of the workshop: the master demonstrates, the apprentice acts, fails, receives correction, acts again and gradually acquires the movement. The vocabulary of the two worlds is therefore different. One explains. The other guides. One communicates what something is. The other initiates someone into how to do it.
This distinction illuminates the difference between catechesis and initiation into spiritual life. It also illuminates the remarkable economy of John’s Gospel, whose limited vocabulary nevertheless communicates profound mysteries, and whose purpose is not merely that the reader understand but that he believe. It illuminates Pseudo-Dionysius, whose simple created names point towards the incomprehensible God and whose Mystical Theology progressively strips language away until the intellect enters divine darkness.
It also raises a fundamental question about theology itself. If theology becomes primarily a system of propositions about God, Christianity can become something that is principally known about. If theology becomes a theology ordered towards spiritual formation, the Christian mystery appears as something to be lived. The question is therefore not whether we need theology. We need theology profoundly. The question is what theology is for. The Imitation of Christ gives us the criterion: “What good does it do to speak learnedly about the Trinity if, lacking humility, you displease the Trinity?” The answer is not to abandon the Trinity. It is to learn to please the Trinity. It is not to abandon Christology. It is to follow Christ. It is not to abandon pneumatology. It is to become docile to the Holy Spirit. It is not to abandon theology of charity. It is to learn to love. This is why a theology of spiritual formation is not an optional appendix to theology. It touches the very purpose of theological knowledge. The first theology needed by the Christian is therefore a theology that does not merely tell him what God has revealed, but begins to teach him how to live before the God who has revealed himself. And even this formulation is not yet deep enough. The Christian is not ultimately learning a technique. He is learning a relationship. He is learning to respond to grace. He is learning the movement of love.
And here St John of the Cross gives the final word to the whole pedagogy. God himself becomes the Master. He does not merely give the soul an external lesson in love. He teaches it to love by communicating his own love, “as if He put an instrument in its hand, taught it the use thereof, and played upon it together with the soul”.
The human teacher can only prepare the workshop. The Holy Spirit performs the deepest teaching. The theologian can communicate truth. The spiritual teacher can guide practice. The Church can provide the sacramental and ecclesial environment. But God himself must form the movement within the person. Thus the entire journey can finally be expressed in one movement: from hearing to understanding; from understanding to trying; from trying to practising; from practising to interiorisation; from interiorisation to freedom; and from freedom to loving under the action of the Holy Spirit. The mature Christian is not the person who has accumulated the greatest number of propositions about God. He is the person in whom the truth has become life. He has entered the workshop. He has learned the movement. And ultimately, he has learned to let the Master take his hand. The movement is love. And the Master is the Holy Spirit.
Read also
On Renewing Theology From Within
Bibliography
Barrett, C. K. The Gospel According to St John: An Introduction with Commentary and Notes on the Greek Text. 2nd ed. London: SPCK, 1978.
Ferrer-i-Cancho, Ramon, and Ricard V. Solé. “Least Effort and the Origins of Scaling in Human Language.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100, no. 3 (2003): 788–791. The authors formalise the interaction between speaker and hearer effort in relation to Zipfian scaling.
John of the Cross. The Collected Works of St John of the Cross. Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1973.
John of the Cross. The Spiritual Canticle, especially stanzas 26, 37 and 38.
Knowles, Malcolm S. The Adult Learner: A Neglected Species. Houston: Gulf Publishing, 1973.
Knowles, Malcolm S., Elwood F. Holton III, and Richard A. Swanson. The Adult Learner: The Definitive Classic in Adult Education and Human Resource Development. 6th ed. Burlington, MA: Elsevier, 2005.
Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Their account of learning through participation in communities of practice is particularly relevant to the apprenticeship model developed here.
Mezirow, Jack. “Transformative Learning: Theory to Practice.” New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education1997, no. 74 (1997): 5–12.
O’Collins, Gerald G. “Believing as Verbal in John’s Gospel.” The Expository Times 134, no. 9 (2023): 399–408. O’Collins’ analysis of the absence of πίστις and the extensive use of πιστεύω is particularly important for the distinction between a discourse about faith and the act of believing.
Piantadosi, Steven T., Harry Tily, and Edward Gibson. “Word Lengths Are Optimized for Efficient Communication.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 9 (2011): 3526–3529.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The Divine Names; The Mystical Theology. The treatment of divine names and the movement from affirmation towards negation is central to the discussion of theological language.
Schön, Donald A. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books, 1983. Schön’s concept of reflection-in-action is important for understanding learning within practice rather than merely through the prior application of abstract theory.
Sigurd, Bengt, Mats Eeg-Olofsson, and Joost van de Weijer. “Word Length, Sentence Length and Frequency – Zipf Revisited.” Studia Linguistica 58, no. 1 (2004): 37–52.
Thomas à Kempis. The Imitation of Christ, Book I, chapter 1. The warning against learned discourse about the Trinity without humility and holiness provides one of the central theological criteria of this article.
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Our Hearts Were Burning Within Us: A Pastoral Plan for Adult Faith Formation in the United States. Washington, DC, 1999. Particularly §§81–83, on active participation, adult experience, conversion and the inadequacy of passive listening.
Vatican. Congregation for the Clergy. General Directory for Catechesis. 1997, especially §§61 and 175–176, on the tasks and forms of adult catechesis, Scripture, prayer, retreats and spiritual direction.
Vatican. Congregation for the Clergy. Adult Catechesis in the Christian Community. 1990, especially §§48–50, on adult experience, dynamic catechesis, spirituality and teaching adults how to pray.
Novakovic, Lidija. John 1–10: A Handbook on the Greek Text / John 11–21: A Handbook on the Greek Text. The statistical comparison of Johannine vocabulary with the Synoptics is especially useful for the discussion of John’s restricted vocabulary.
Zipf, George Kingsley. Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1949.
Casas, Bernardino, Antoni Hernández-Fernández, Neus Català, Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho, and Jaume Baixeries. “Polysemy and Brevity versus Frequency in Language.” Computer Speech & Language 58 (2019): 19–50.