Jean Khoury
The following two balloons represent two dimensions of Christian existence which must never be separated.
The balloon on the right represents the external world of Christian faith: Sacred Scripture, Dogma, Liturgy, the Sacraments, Moral Theology and Pastoral Theology. This is the objective world of what God has revealed and what the Church believes, celebrates and teaches. It is the world that theology ordinarily studies with the instruments of intellectual enquiry. We learn what the Church believes about God, Christ, salvation, grace, the Church, the Sacraments, Christian morality and the Christian vocation.
But there is another world: the interior world. This is the world of God dwelling in the human person, the world of grace, prayer, purification, conversion, the growth of charity, contemplation and union with Christ. It is the world in which the objective realities of faith become progressively understood, received, assimilated and lived within the person. The mistake is to imagine that theology belongs only to the external balloon (hence the small size of the balloon to the left).
An integral theology must intellectually form both worlds. It must not only explain what we believe; it must also teach us what these truths mean for the interior life of the person who believes them. It must illuminate not only the object of faith, but also the transformation which that faith is meant to produce in the believer. Thus every theological discipline has, in reality, these two dimensions.
Scripture is not only a text to be exegetically understood; it is also the Word through which God speaks to the person and forms Christ within him. Dogma is not merely a collection of propositions to be intellectually grasped; it expresses realities which the believer is called progressively to know, receive and live. Liturgy is not simply something the Church publicly celebrates; it is the objective action of Christ which is meant to transform the person who participates in it. The Sacraments are not merely theological objects of study; they are divine instruments through which Christ communicates His life. Moral theology is not merely a system of norms; it concerns the transformation of the human person and the progressive conformity of his life to Christ. Pastoral theology is not merely the science of organising Christian activity; it concerns how the life of Christ is communicated to persons and how persons are led towards the fullness of Christian life.
Consequently, the pipe between the two balloons is not an accessory. It is essential. It represents the bridge between theology and spiritual life, between objective revelation and subjective appropriation, between what is believed and what is lived, between the truth confessed by the Church and the truth progressively realised within the person.
If the external world is intellectually developed without the interior world, theology can become disconnected from the very transformation for which revelation was given. Conversely, if the interior world develops without the objective content of revelation, spiritual experience can become detached from the truth of the faith.
Integral theology therefore strengthens both balloons while simultaneously enlarging and strengthening the bridge between them. Its ultimate purpose is not simply that the Christian should know more about God, but that what he knows about God should progressively become a reality within him.
This is remarkably close to what St. Teresa of Avila describes at the summit of the Interior Castle. In the Seventh Mansions, she describes an intellectual vision of the Most Holy Trinity. She says that the soul is given a knowledge by which it understands with certainty that the three Persons are one substance, one power and one knowledge, “so that what we hold by faith the soul may be said here to grasp by sight, although nothing is seen by the eyes, either of the body or of the soul, for it is no imaginary vision.”
This is an extraordinarily important statement for an understanding of integral theology. Teresa is not saying that the content of faith has changed. The Trinity was already believed. What changes is the interior apprehension of the reality believed. What was externally professed by faith has become inwardly perceived and experienced through the transforming action of God. She goes on to exclaim: “Oh God help me! What a difference there is between hearing and believing these words and being led in this way to realise how true they are!” Here the bridge between the two worlds has reached its fullest expression. The truth has not ceased to be objective truth; rather, objective truth has become profoundly assimilated within the person.
This is perhaps the deepest meaning of the two balloons.
The goal is not to choose between the external world and the interior world. The goal is their integration. The external truth of revelation enters the interior person, and the interior person is progressively transformed according to that truth. Theology serves this movement by forming the intellect in both directions: towards the objective mystery revealed by God and towards the interior transformation which that mystery is intended to accomplish.
At the summit, what was believed is no longer merely something one knows about God. It becomes something one knows in God.
The Seventh Mansion therefore gives us a kind of eschatological horizon for theology: the progressive passage from hearing and believing to understanding and seeing, not seeing with the bodily eyes, but seeing by an interior knowledge given by God. The objective content of faith and the interior experience of its reality are not two different truths. They are two modes of participation in the same divine reality.
This is why theology must build the bridge.
We are not meant to remain theologically and intellectually blind to the interior world. The life of grace, the action of God within the person, the growth of charity, the purification of the heart, the movements of the human faculties, prayer, contemplation, discernment and union with Christ are not realities that each student or seminarian should simply be left to discover for himself, helped only by a few talks on spiritual life.
If the interior life is a real dimension of Christian existence, then it must also be approached theologically. It requires a body of knowledge, a language, a coherent framework and a method by which it can be understood, studied and integrated with the rest of theology.
We would never expect a seminarian to understand and experience Scripture, dogma, liturgy, the sacraments or moral theology merely through a few occasional spiritual conferences and then tell him to work out the rest for himself. Yet this is often what happens with the interior life. The seminarian is given some spiritual conferences, perhaps some guidance in prayer and spiritual direction, while the theological understanding of what is actually taking place within the soul remains largely undeveloped. We feed the bark, and ignore the sap.
This creates a fundamental imbalance in theological formation. Theology illuminates the external and objective dimensions of the Christian mystery, but it must also illuminate the mystery as it is lived within the person. The interior world cannot remain a theological blind spot.
The seminarian therefore needs to acquire not only knowledge about God and the Church, but also a theological understanding of what God does in the human person: how grace operates, how the person grows in charity, how the faculties are transformed, how purification takes place, how prayer develops, how contemplation arises, how the person is progressively conformed to Christ and how this transformation ultimately bears fruit in mission.
This is precisely where a truly integral theology becomes necessary. It does not abandon intellectual formation in order to become “more spiritual”. Rather, it extends theological intelligence into the interior world itself. It gives the seminarian the intellectual and theological instruments necessary to understand the life of God in the human person, just as he is given the intellectual instruments to understand God’s revelation, the Church and the sacramental economy.
The interior life, therefore, should not be treated as something private, secondary or largely self-directed. It belongs within theology itself. A mature theological formation should enable the future priest to understand both the mystery he is called to teach and the mystery of its transformation within the human person.