Jean Khoury

Summary: A well-known university anecdote distinguishes the professor from the teacher: the teacher is responsible for the student’s learning outcomes, while the professor leads the student to the fountain of knowledge without being able to make him drink. This article extends that distinction, all things considered, to the spiritual life. The catechist, like the teacher, transmits the content of the faith; the spiritual formator, like the professor, leads the seeker to the very source of living water, but cannot drink in his place. Refining this analogy through the teaching of St. Teresa of Ávila, St. John of the Cross, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the Council of Trent, the article shows that “directness” in the spiritual life does not mean the absence of mediation but the true term of a mediated act: God himself. From this, a concrete order of counsel is proposed for the spiritual seeker, culminating in the vocation to become, like the Evangelist Luke’s witnesses, a “servant of the Word.” A final section considers the spiritual director, whose task mirrors that of the formator, and who must himself continue to be formed, since no one can undertake that inner labour in his place.

Introduction

A Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston is remembered for a lecture in which he drew a sharp line between the high-school teacher and the university professor. “I am your professor, not your teacher,” he told his students. The teacher, he explained, is evaluated by the learning outcomes of the student, generally measured by standardised tests; if the student does not learn, the teacher is blamed. The professor’s task is different: “It is no part of my job to make you learn. At university, learning is your job and yours alone. My job is to lead you to the fountain of knowledge. Whether you drink deeply or only gargle is entirely up to you.” The words, commonly traced to Dr Keith Parsons, have circulated for years in study-skills materials, sometimes altered, but the closing image — the fountain, and the freedom either to drink or merely to gargle — remains constant, and it captures something that reaches well beyond the university lecture hall.

This article proposes that the same distinction, applied with the necessary qualifications, illuminates the difference between the catechist and the spiritual formator, and, more importantly, clarifies where the true weight of responsibility falls in the spiritual life: on the seeker himself. It is not a matter of knowledge or of science. It is a matter of meeting God.

I. The Professor and the Teacher: A Secular Parable of Responsibility

John Henry Newman had already articulated the deeper principle at stake, a century before any lecture hall anecdote made it memorable. For Newman, the proper work of a university is not the transfer of information but a formation of the intellect for its own sake: “the process of training, by which the intellect, instead of being formed or sacrificed to some particular or accidental purpose… is disciplined for its own sake” (The Idea of a University, Discourse V). The teacher instructs; the professor forms — and formation, unlike instruction, cannot be imposed from without. It requires the free, sustained engagement of the one being formed. This is why the professor can only lead to the fountain: what happens at the fountain belongs to the student alone.

II. From the Lecture Hall to the School of the Spirit

The analogy transposes readily, and fruitfully, into the order of grace, provided it is qualified from the outset. A catechist is principally responsible for transmitting the content of the faith. A good catechist certainly seeks to awaken faith and to accompany persons individually, but his principal task remains the faithful teaching of revealed doctrine. A spiritual formator, or master of the spiritual life, is not simply charged with imparting knowledge about prayer or holiness. His task is to accompany a person in learning to respond to the action of the Holy Spirit. He cannot make anyone grow spiritually, any more than a professor can make a student learn. He can discern, guide, correct, encourage, and point toward the fountain, but the seeker’s daily fidelity to grace remains indispensable and non-transferable.

This resonates deeply with the classical spiritual tradition. St. John of the Cross insists throughout his writings that the director’s role is to help the soul follow the action of God rather than to substitute himself for that action. St. Teresa of Ávila likewise emphasises that no spiritual guide can produce contemplation; it is God’s work, to which the soul must freely cooperate. The analogy can therefore be formulated thus: the catechist principally teaches the faith; the spiritual formator principally teaches a person how to live by the faith. The catechist transmits the Gospel; the spiritual formator accompanies the disciple in responding personally to the Gospel under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. He can lead the person to the fountain of living water, but he cannot drink for them.

That final image carries a distinctly Johannine resonance. Jesus himself says, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink” (John 7:37). The master of the spiritual life can bring the disciple to Christ, help him recognise the action of the Spirit, and teach him discernment, but the daily act of listening, receiving, and obeying the Word belongs to the disciple alone.

Teresa of Ávila sharpens this further with her characteristic realism: whoever has the experience will understand her. The catechist imparts knowledge, useful, even necessary, to the spiritual life, yet limited, in a sense, to outward acts. The spiritual master carries a properly theological vocation: he leads the seeker toward God himself. Analogically, and all things considered, one could say that the catechist contemplates and shares what he has contemplated, while the spiritual master teaches how to contemplate. The difference is considerable. But precisely because of it, the responsibility resting on the seeker becomes very high. It is not a question of knowledge or of science. It is a question of meeting God.

III. Mediation, Not Immediacy: A Necessary Clarification

This last affirmation calls for theological precision, lest “directness” be misread as an escape from mediation. In Catholic theology, no one has access to God in a way that bypasses mediation altogether: grace is always mediated — through Christ’s humanity, Scripture, the sacraments, the Church, and discernment. The difference between catechesis and spiritual formation, then, is not a difference between mediation and its absence, but a difference of mode and of end. The catechist mediates primarily doctrinal content, ordered to intellectual assimilation of what the Church believes and teaches. The spiritual formator mediates a different mode of reception: how the believer becomes disposed to actualise grace in prayer, discernment, and transformation. In scholastic terms, one is ordered principally to fides quae creditur — the faith that is believed — the other to the maturation of fides qua creditur — the act of believing as lived union with God.

St. Thomas Aquinas offers the precise key for holding “direct contact” and “mediation” together without contradiction. Every theological act, insofar as it is theological, is ordered immediately to God as its final term, even though it is always exercised through created mediations. Aquinas is characteristically sober about the limits of this knowledge: “We cannot know what God is, but rather what He is not” (Summa Theologiae I, q. 3, prol.). Yet this apophatic caution does not diminish real contact with God; it clarifies its mode. The intellect is not grasping God as one object among others; it is truly ordered toward him as its ultimate end. St. John of the Cross will go further and say that Faith gives us (obtains) God.

The same holds for the sacramental order. The sacrament is not a bare sign pointing elsewhere; it is an efficacious sign that truly communicates what it signifies. The Council of Trent states this concisely: “The sacraments of the New Law contain the grace which they signify and confer it on those who do not place an obstacle” (Session VII, Decree on the Sacraments). Yet this sacramental realism becomes spiritually operative only through faith. As Aquinas writes, “the sacraments of the New Law cause grace in virtue of the Passion of Christ, and by faith in that Passion” (Summa Theologiae III, q. 62, a. 4). Faith does not negate the sign; it penetrates it. It does not abandon mediation; it allows mediation to function as mediation rather than as an endpoint.

Every authentic theological act, then, is a real relation to God, not merely to concepts about God. This relation is always sacramentally and ecclesially mediated — through Christ’s humanity, Scripture, the Church, and the sacraments — but it is truly ordered to God himself as its living end. Faith is the interior capacity by which the believer does not stop at the sign but is carried through it to the grace it communicates. “Direct contact” is not opposed to mediation; it describes the intentionality and the term of the act. The contact is real, but it is a mediated immediacy, a participation in God, rather than an unmediated grasp of him. Catechesis concerns the communication of revealed content; spiritual formation concerns the transformation of the subject so that this same content becomes lived contact with God in faith, hope, and charity. The strength of this whole distinction lies precisely in its resistance to reducing theology to information transfer, while never allowing “directness” and mediation to be read as competitors rather than as two aspects of a single sacramental economy.

IV. The Counsel Owed to the Seeker

If the analogy is sound, the advice to be given to the spiritual seeker shifts in kind. It is no longer “here is what you must know,” but “here is how you must seek.” The seeker is not merely acquiring information; he is learning an art of living before God. A sequence of counsel follows.

Seek the truth before seeking experiences. Authentic spiritual life begins with God as he reveals himself, not with what one happens to feel.

Place the Word of God above everything else. Read it daily, listen before speaking, and let it judge your thoughts and desires. As Dei Verbum teaches, “In the sacred books, the Father who is in heaven comes lovingly to meet his children, and talks with them” (DV 21).

Pray every day, whether you feel like it or not. Purity. Fidelity forms the heart more deeply than emotion ever could. St Teresa of Ávila defines mental prayer simply as “an intimate sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with him who we know loves us” (Life 8.5).

Put into practice what you receive. Jesus says, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it” (Luke 11:28). Spiritual understanding grows through obedience, not through accumulation.

Do not seek extraordinary graces; seek true holiness. St John of the Cross repeatedly warns that attachment to visions, locutions, or consolations hinders union with God.

Learn to distinguish God’s action from your own activity. Much of spiritual growth consists in becoming increasingly receptive rather than increasingly active.

Accept purification. Come out of yourself. There are times when God seems absent. These periods are often moments of deeper formation, not signs of failure.

Seek wise accompaniment. God guides you also through this way and confirms the graces He gives you. A spiritual guide cannot replace the Holy Spirit, but he can help discern the Spirit’s action and protect the seeker against illusion.

Remain in the Church. And dive deeper in her mystery. The Christian journey is personal but never isolated. The liturgy, the sacraments, and the communion of believers are the ordinary means by which Christ forms his disciples.

Take responsibility for your own growth. No guide, however holy, can pray, believe, or surrender in your place. As in the professor’s analogy: someone can lead you to the fountain, but only you can drink.

V. Becoming a Servant of the Word

One further piece of counsel crowns the rest, and corresponds most closely to the true goal of spiritual formation: become a servant of the Word. St Luke describes those from whom he received the Gospel as men who had become “eyewitnesses and servants of the word” (Luke 1:2). The goal is not merely to know the Word, nor even simply to proclaim it, but to receive it daily from the living Christ, to let it take root, and to let it transform one’s whole life. The seeker matures into a disciple the moment listening becomes the governing attitude of his entire existence. The spiritual quest, then, reaches its fulfillment not in finding a method or in accumulating knowledge, but in becoming a person habitually attentive and obedient to the living Word of God.

VI. The Spiritual Director: One Who Shows the Way Without Walking It for Another

The same logic governs, with particular force, the ministry of the spiritual director. His mission is essentially the mission of the spiritual formator: he can show how. He can point to the fountain, name the movements of grace, unmask illusion, and encourage perseverance in the night of purification. But he cannot walk the road himself in place of the directee. Prayer, surrender, obedience to the Word, the daily yes to grace — none of this can be delegated. The director accompanies; he does not substitute. His art, however refined, remains at the service of a freedom and a fidelity that belong entirely to the one he accompanies. This is precisely why the responsibility of the seeker is not diminished by good direction but is, on the contrary, clarified and confirmed by it: the better the director, the more clearly the directee sees that the drinking is his own to do.

VII. The Guide’s Own Ascent: Nobody Forms the Formator in His Place

A final observation follows naturally from all the above, and it applies to the spiritual director and the spiritual formator themselves. Their art is not acquired once and then simply exercised; it too must grow, and it grows only through the same law that governs the seeker’s own path. The director can deepen his discernment, refine his art of accompaniment, and mature in wisdom and prudence — but only by going deeper himself, by his own fidelity to prayer, to formation, to the Word, and to the purifications that every serious spiritual life entails. Nobody can do this labour in his place. The one who leads others to the fountain must himself continue, without interruption, to drink from it.

Practical Conclusions

For the spiritual seeker:

• Distinguish clearly, in your own expectations, between what a catechist owes you and what a spiritual guide owes you; do not ask of one what belongs to the other.
• Establish a daily, non-negotiable rhythm of the Word and of prayer, independent of feeling.
• Treat obedience to what you have already received as more urgent than the search for anything new.
• Do not measure your spiritual life by extraordinary experiences; measure it by fidelity in ordinary acts.
• Accept periods of apparent absence as formation rather than failure, and bring them, rather than hide them, to your director.
• Remain visibly and sacramentally rooted in the Church; do not privatize your spiritual journey.
• Recognize, at every stage, that no one — however wise or holy — can believe, pray, or surrender in your place.

For the spiritual director or formator:

• Remember that your task is to show the way, never to walk it in the other’s place.
• Let good direction produce, in the directee, an ever clearer sense of his own responsibility, not a dependence on you.
• Continue your own formation deliberately: your own prayer, your own director, your own ongoing study of the spiritual masters.
• Accept that your art deepens only through your own labour and fidelity; no one else can do this for you.

Conclusion

The professor who refuses to be a teacher, and instead leads his students to the fountain of knowledge, offers an image whose theological depth exceeds its origin. Applied to the spiritual life, it clarifies rather than diminishes the roles of catechist and spiritual formator: both are true mediators of the one Mystery, yet ordered to different ends — the mind’s assimilation of revealed truth, and the whole person’s lived union with the God who reveals himself. Rightly understood, “direct contact with God” never means an escape from mediation; it names the true term of an act that remains, from beginning to end, sacramentally and ecclesially mediated. What this analogy safeguards, above all, is the incommunicable responsibility of the seeker. He may be taught, accompanied, corrected, and encouraged; he may be led, again and again, to the very edge of the fountain. But no one — neither catechist, nor spiritual formator, nor spiritual director — can drink in his place. And the same law binds the guide himself: his art grows only as he, too, continues to drink.

Bibliography

• Parsons, Keith. Lecture remarks on the distinction between professor and teacher, as reproduced in university study-skills materials, including East Tennessee State University resources.
• Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University. 1852. Discourse V.
• The Holy Bible. John 7:37; Luke 1:2; Luke 11:28.
• Second Vatican Council. Dei Verbum, no. 21.
• Teresa of Ávila. The Book of Her Life, 8.5; 10.9.
• John of the Cross. Ascent of Mount Carmel, I.13.11.
• Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae, I, q. 3, prol.; III, q. 62, a. 4.
• Council of Trent. Session VII, Decree on the Sacraments.