Lectio Divina, Spiritual Growth, and the Living Food of the Word

Jean Khoury

Summary: This article explores the nature of scriptural reading within the context of spiritual growth, arguing that the way a person encounters the Word of God is not a static, intellectual exercise but a living, evolving form of nourishment that adapts to each stage of the interior life. Drawing on the teaching of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Gregory the Great, and the patristic tradition, as well as the example of St. John of the Cross, the article demonstrates that the diverse spiritual senses of Scripture are not a catalogue of interpretive options but successive forms of divine food offered to the soul as it advances from the shore of literal understanding, through the symbolic crossing of the spiritual life, toward the union with God for which it was created. Lectio Divina is re-read in this light not as a hermeneutical technique but as a posture of obedience and receptivity before the Living Word, whose transforming action is the sole end of all sacred reading.

Introduction

A question that arises persistently among those who practice Lectio Divina seriously is whether the depth with which the great spiritual writers read the sacred text belongs to them alone, or whether it is, in principle, accessible to every faithful soul who perseveres in this holy practice. The question is not merely theoretical. It touches the very nature of what Lectio Divina is, what the spiritual senses of Scripture are, and what kind of activity God himself intends to perform when a human soul opens the sacred page in prayer.

The present article addresses this question directly, drawing on reflections that have emerged from the teaching offered at the School of Mary. My contention is threefold. First, the depth with which a saint like St. John of the Cross reads the Scriptures is not a private charism peculiar to him; it belongs to a stage of spiritual maturity toward which every persevering practitioner of Lectio Divina is progressively being drawn. Second, the different modes in which Scripture speaks to the soul, from the plain literal sense to the deepest mystical resonance, are not parallel interpretive options but successive forms of food, each adapted to a particular stage of the interior journey. Third, and most fundamentally, the goal of all scriptural reading is not interpretation but transformation: not to find a meaning but to be changed by an encounter with the Living Word who is Jesus Christ.

To develop these claims, the article proceeds in five steps. It first examines what Lectio Divina truly is, over against reductive definitions that intellectualise it. It then presents the threefold schema of spiritual reading proposed by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, showing how it maps the soul’s journey from shore to shore. It goes on to situate the exegetical practice of the Church Fathers within this schema, distinguishing the several activities that fall under the broad heading of “reading Scripture.” It then addresses directly the question of St. John of the Cross and the universality of deep scriptural reading. Finally, it draws practical conclusions for anyone who desires to receive, through the sacred text, the daily food that only God can give.

I. What Lectio Divina Really Is—and What It Is Not

The word Lectio Divina has suffered a curious fate in our time. Consulted in popular references, one finds it defined primarily as an intellectual exercise aimed at discovering successive layers of meaning in a biblical text, a kind of sacred hermeneutics for the spiritually minded. The ancient monks, whose practice it was, would not have recognised this description. They would have found it, at best, a dangerous reduction, and at worst, a subtle form of spiritual vanity.

Lectio Divina, at its most essential, is listening to the Word of God and putting it into practice. This is not a modern or Scholastic definition; it is the one Jesus himself offers in the Gospel: “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” (Lk 6:46).¹ The constitutive act of Lectio Divina is not interpretation but obedience. The soul opens the sacred text in order to hear what the Lord wishes to say to it today, and then to act upon that word.

This does not mean that interpretation has no place; it means that interpretation is not the goal. As St. Gregory the Great writes in a sentence that has rightly become a touchstone of the tradition, Scriptura crescit cum legente—“Scripture grows with the one who reads it.”² The Word of God is not a fixed deposit of meanings that the reader excavates by successive intellectual effort. It is a living word that meets the reader exactly where he stands and feeds him with what he needs at that precise moment of his journey. The change is not in the text; it is in the reader. As the reader grows, the text opens before him in new and deeper ways, not because he has become a better exegete, but because he has become, by God’s grace, a more receptive soul.

This is why practicing Lectio Divina as a method for discovering deeper meanings is, strictly speaking, a contradiction in terms. If one sits down with the sacred text in order to find a new sense, to feel the satisfaction of a novel interpretation, the exercise has already been subtly evacuated of its essential content. The food has been turned into an intellectual object. The Living Word has been replaced by a literary puzzle. We do not read the Scriptures in order to become better readers, or more knowledgable (this doesn’t save us); we read them in order to become better lovers, to be more conformed to Christ, to learn how to carry his cross, to allow his word to convert us each day anew. “​Whoever loves me keeps my commandments” (Jn 14:23).³ This is the end, the only end, of all sacred reading.

II. The Three Stages: Pseudo-Dionysius and the Journey of the Soul

One of the most illuminating frameworks for understanding how Scripture feeds the soul differently at different stages of growth comes from a writer whose historical identity long remained a matter of confusion but whose spiritual authority was immense: Dionysius, known to later scholarship as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.⁴ For centuries, he was believed to be the Dionysius converted by Paul at the Areopagus (Acts 17:34), and this putative proximity to the Apostle conferred on his writings an authority second only to Scripture itself. Great thinkers from St. Thomas Aquinas to St. John of the Cross read him with the deepest reverence.

Whatever the resolution of the historical question, the insight Dionysius offers in this domain remains permanently valid. He maps the journey of the soul toward union with God. To explain it we may use a Gospel image: the crossing of the sea of Gennesaret. The soul begins on one shore, traverses the open waters, and arrives at the opposite shore. Each of these three moments corresponds to a distinct form of engagement with the sacred text.

1. The First Shore: Literal Teaching

The journey begins on the near shore with the plain, literal sense of the biblical word. This first mode of encounter must never be belittled or bypassed. It is absolutely necessary. “Love your enemies.” “Do not kill.” “Jesus is your Saviour.” The Sermon on the Mount, taken at face value, is solid, nourishing, and inexhaustibly demanding. Even the most advanced mystic continues to need this shore; the literal sense remains permanently present beneath every deeper reading, like a beautiful stained-glass window that does not disappear when one begins to perceive the light shining through it.

This is also the level at which the structural integrity of our faith is secured. Pure exegetical study, i.e. the intellectual inquiry into original languages, historical contexts, and ancient commentaries, belongs here as a necessary service. It ensures that the edifice of our interpretation rests on solid ground rather than on fantasy. The literal sense is not the ceiling of Lectio; it is its floor.

2. Crossing the Sea: Symbolic Exegesis

As the soul leaves the first shore, it enters a long and often difficult crossing. It has begun to open to divine realities; it is drawn forward by something it cannot yet fully see. Yet it has not arrived at the opposite shore of union. What does it need during this extended passage? The tradition answers: symbols, images, colours, numbers, figures, the whole rich vocabulary of typological and moral exegesis that the Church Fathers deployed with such extraordinary creativity.

Those who come to the Fathers cold, that is, without any experience of the crossing, often find their exegesis bizarre or excessive. Why should the five porches at the pool of Bethesda (Jn 5) represent the five books of the Pentateuch? Why should the two denarii given by the Good Samaritan to the innkeeper represent the two commandments of love, or the Old and New Testaments? These readings can seem, to the uninitiated, like an arbitrary imposition of meaning upon the text.⁵

But this judgment misses the point entirely. The symbols are not decorations; they are food. They are precisely what a soul in transit needs: something that opens it up, that allows it to see beyond the letter, that teaches it to read creation and history as a tissue of signs pointing toward God. The symbolic mode of reading is not a more sophisticated intellectual achievement than the literal; it is a different kind of nourishment, appropriate to a different stage of hunger. To criticize the Fathers for reading too symbolically is like criticizing a good parent for giving different food to a growing child than to a newborn.

3. The Opposite Shore: Union with God

When the soul finally arrives at the opposite shore, which is not a geographical but a spiritual destination, the state of union with God, something remarkable happens in its reading of Scripture. Long sentences, elaborate symbolic constructions, and complex typological correspondences become less necessary. The soul is touching the reality itself, and the simplest, most earthly image (fire, water, oil) becomes, paradoxically, intensely luminous and communicative.

This is the law of divine proportions that Pseudo-Dionysius articulates with particular insight: the closer a person is to union, the more powerfully the most basic and lowly symbols speak to them. The mystics of the Rhineland school, Meister Eckhart, Jan van Ruusbroec, Johannes Tauler, could preach an entire homily turning upon a single word. At this stage, the soul no longer needs the elaborate scaffolding; it is standing before the house itself.⁶

These three stages are not a menu of options. They are not categories that a theologian can select from according to preference. They are successive modes of reception, spread across the actual arc of a soul’s journey toward God. This is precisely the point that many treatments of the “spiritual senses of Scripture” fail to grasp. They present the fourfold sense (literal, typological, moral, anagogical) as a static taxonomy, a flat list of available lenses. But these senses are not simultaneous options; they unfold over the journey itself, feeding the soul where it stands, pulling it forward toward where it needs to go.

III. The Fathers of the Church: Homilies, Commentaries, and the Grace of God

When one contemplates the sheer volume of biblical interpretation bequeathed to us by the Church Fathers—the homilies of Origen, the sermons of Saint Augustine, the commentaries of Saint Jerome, the reflections of Saint Ambrose—one faces the question of how exactly these texts relate to Lectio Divina as we have defined it. Are these the outputs of personal lectio? Are they something else entirely?

The answer requires a careful distinction between at least two categories of patristic texts, each of which has its own character and purpose.

1. Homilies: The Pastoral Act of Feeding the Flock

A homily is not primarily a personal act of reception; it is a pastoral act of transmission (a “lectio” for the actual present community). When a bishop or priest prepares a homily, he is functioning as a shepherd who seeks to feed those entrusted to his care. He may perfectly prepare his Homily doing a Lectio, but it is a Lectio not pointed out to him (ie personal lectio) but a lectio directed to the community gathered. He may enlarge the text, develop a theme that is only tangentially present in the passage, or depart in directions that his own spiritual state would not require, because the flock before him needs something particular that day. The homily is not the Father’s personal Lectio; it is the fruit of his prayerful reflection offered in service of others.

Yet the grace of God can make itself visible with particular clarity in this pastoral context. There is a famous account of St. Augustine who, on one occasion, rose to preach and found that the reader had accidentally turned to the wrong passage. Rather than interrupting the reading and returning to his prepared text, Augustine laid aside his notes (or prepared homily) entirely and asked the congregation to pray with him: “Knock at the door of God’s word together with me, so that the Lord will give me something I can give to you.”⁷ Those who read the surviving record of that homily can identify, with some precision, the exact moment when the effort of purely human preparation ceases and a sudden divine illumination takes over. The light changes quality on the page.

This is not a matter of literary style; it is the visible trace of a grace. And it illustrates something essential: even in the homiletic form, which is pastoral and outward-directed, the Word of God retains the capacity to act on and through the preacher in ways that transcend his preparation. The shepherd can himself be fed even as he feeds others.

2. Commentaries: Tranquil Meditative Exposition

A commentary is a different activity. Here the Father sits alone, in relative tranquillity, with the open text. He meditates, prays, consults, and writes an exposition intended to open up the Scripture for others who will read it, perhaps long after his death. The commentary is more deliberate and more controlled than the homily; it draws more explicitly on the Father’s intellectual formation and spiritual depth. It is illumined by grace but is an act of teaching rather than, strictly speaking, of personal Lectio.

Both activities, and others that fall in the range between them, such as monastic rumination, pure exegetical study, and systematic spiritual reading, have their proper place in the economy of a life given to the Word of God. None of them is simply equivalent to Lectio Divina in the strict sense, though all of them can be elevated and purified by God’s grace into something that produces genuine spiritual fruit. What distinguishes Lectio from all of them is its essentially receptive and obediential character: in Lectio, the soul is not producing, teaching, or transmitting, it is listening and being transformed.

IV. St. John of the Cross and the Universality of Deep Reading

We return now to the question with which we began. Is the way St. John of the Cross reads the Scriptures specific to him, the fruit of a private charism given to him alone so that he might explain the heights of the spiritual life with unparalleled precision? Or is it, at least in principle, offered to every soul that perseveres faithfully in the daily practice of Lectio Divina?

The answer, I am convinced, is the latter. When I draw attention in teaching to the way John of the Cross reads a psalm, a verse from the Song of Songs, or a passage from the prophets, I am not saying: “admire this from a safe distance; it is not for you.” I am saying: “notice what happens when a soul has been deeply purified; this is where the road leads; this is what awaits those who do not give up.” The depth of his reading is not a separate charism layered on top of his holiness; it is his holiness, expressed in the act of receiving the Word.

Consider the dynamics of the situation. John of the Cross is writing from within a state of deep union with God. He is not using the Scriptures to discover union; he is writing from union, and he discovers in the Scriptures, in a text he already knows well at the literal level, the illumined resonances that correspond to where he now stands. Jesus, the Living Word, is speaking to him through these texts and feeding him with the food appropriate to his stage of the journey. He is not choosing these resonances from among available options; they are being given to him. The text looks to him the way it looks to him because of what God has done in his soul.

This is exactly what St. Gregory the Great means when he says that Scripture grows with the reader.⁸ Origen makes the same point through a different image: the Scriptures, he suggests, are like Jesus himself. When you first approach them, you encounter the outer layer (the letter of the text, the plain historical meaning) just as the crowds who encountered Jesus saw a man of flesh and blood. As you grow, you begin to penetrate to the interior life of the text, just as the disciples began to perceive the divine depth hidden within the humanity of Christ. And at the furthest reach, you enter into what Origen calls the spiritual meaning, i.e. the contact with the divine reality itself, just as the Beloved Disciple, leaning on the breast of the Lord at the Last Supper, rested in the very heart of the Word.⁹

Now, the key point is this: St. John of the Cross is not reading the Scriptures with a special technique. He is reading them from a particular depth of interior life. And that interior life, while it represents the summit of the spiritual journey and is not achieved in a short time, is in principle the destination of every soul created in the image of God. It is what baptism begins, what the sacraments nourish, what prayer deepens, and what Lectio Divina—practiced faithfully, obedientially, over many years—progressively conforms us toward.

I have had the moving experience, on a number of occasions, of receiving a question from a person who practices Lectio Divina regularly and who asks with some anxiety: “Jean, I was reading this passage and I am not sure if I am losing the plot. Can you tell me if this is correct?” And they describe what they have received from the text. More often than not, what they describe is strikingly close to what St. Ambrose or St. Augustine or Origen says about the same passage. They arrived there not by reading the Fathers, not by studying patristic exegesis, but by sitting quietly before the Living Word and allowing themselves to be fed. This is not an anecdote; it is a confirmation of the entire tradition.

The tears one feels in reading such questions come from recognising in them the fingerprints of the Holy Spirit. Not the Spirit of intellectual discovery, but the Spirit of adoption who leads us into all truth (Jn 16:13)—the Spirit who fed Augustine and Ambrose and who continues, in every generation, to feed those who come to the sacred page with open, obedient hands.

V. Practical Conclusions: How to Receive the Daily Food

The foregoing analysis has direct and practical implications for anyone who desires to read the Scriptures truly in the Spirit. They may be summarised in five brief orientations.

1. Come to the Text as a Recipient, Not as an Analyst

The fundamental disposition of Lectio Divina is receptivity, not productivity. You come not to extract meanings but to be addressed by a Person. Before you open the sacred page, recollect yourself, acknowledge that you are entering into the presence of the Living Word, and ask the Holy Spirit to feed you with what you need today. The text is not an object to be analysed; it is the place of an encounter.

2. Stay on Your Shore, and Let God Move You

Do not attempt to artificially reproduce the symbolic depth of the Fathers, or the mystical luminosity of St. John of the Cross. You will receive the food appropriate to where you actually are in your journey, not the food appropriate to where you imagine yourself to be, or where you would like to be. Receive what God gives you today. Trust the process. The food will deepen as you deepen. Trying to short-circuit this by pursuing deeper meanings as an intellectual project is the surest way to remain on the near shore indefinitely.

3. Obey Before You Interpret

The rule is simple and demanding: before you attempt to understand more deeply, implement what you already understand. The literal sense of the Sermon on the Mount is more than enough to occupy a lifetime of conversion. If you are not living what the text says at its most immediate level, adding layers of symbolic interpretation will produce not illumination but illusion. The depth of one’s reading is always proportionate to the depth of one’s conversion. This is not a threat; it is a promise.

4. Do Not Doubt the Interior Light

When, in the course of faithful Lectio Divina, you receive an insight that surprises you—a resonance between the text and some aspect of your interior life, a symbolic connection that seems to illuminate something you did not understand before—do not immediately dismiss it as fantasy or self-projection. Test it against the rule of charity and the integrity of the faith, bring it to your spiritual director, but do not automatically disqualify it. The Holy Spirit fed the Desert Fathers and fed Origen and fed Augustine; the same Spirit remains active in the Church today, and there is no reason why his illuminating action should be restricted to those who lived in the first five centuries.

5. Remember: the Scriptures Are at the Service of the Meal

This may be the most important orientation of all. The Scriptures are not the final goal; God is the final goal. The sacred text is at the service of an encounter with a Person. When we turn the spiritual senses of Scripture into an academic taxonomy (i.e. a list of hermeneutical categories to be learned and applied) we have, in effect, put the menu in the place of the meal. The Fathers of the Church are not monuments to be admired from a distance; they are witnesses to an experience that we are invited to share. If their way of reading the Scripture seems remote and strange to us, the right response is not to call it outdated, but to ask ourselves what we need to do in order to arrive where they stood.

Conclusion

Sacred reading, understood in its fullness, is not a method. It is a form of life. It is what happens to a human soul that day after day places itself before the Living Word in an attitude of obedience and love, allowing itself to be nourished, challenged, purified, and ultimately transformed. The different modes in which Scripture speaks, from the plain literal sense to the deepest mystical resonance, are not interpretive options on a flat menu; they are the successive forms of food that God offers to a soul as it moves, stage by stage, from the near shore of initial conversion to the distant shore of union with him.

St. John of the Cross reads the Scriptures the way he reads them because of where his soul has arrived. That destination is not closed to us. It is, in fact, the destination toward which our entire spiritual life is ordered. And the path that leads there is neither primarily academic nor primarily intellectual. It is the path of fidelity: fidelity to daily prayer, fidelity to the sacraments, fidelity to obedience, and, in a singular way that the whole tradition confirms, fidelity to Lectio Divina, to the daily practice of opening one’s hands before the Word of God and asking to be fed.

If we can recover this vision, if we can teach the spiritual journey itself, and within that journey show what kind of food belongs to each stage, we will have restored to sacred reading its proper place at the heart of the Christian life. The book remains the same. Jesus remains the same. But he feeds us differently depending on whether we are still on the near shore, struggling with the crossing, or resting at last in the union with him that is both the end of all our striving and the beginning of an eternal life.

Notes

1  See Lk 6:46; cf. Jas 1:22: “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only.”

2  Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Ezechielem, I, VII, 8 (PL 76, 843D): “Divina eloquia cum legente crescunt.” Cf. the companion article on this theme published on the School of Mary website [hyperlink to be inserted by the author]. See this article: Scriptures Grow With us, The Experience of the Fathers of the Church

3  The connection between Lectio Divina and the commandment of love is developed at length in the School of Mary teaching week on Lectio Divina.

4  The scholarly consensus identifies the writings attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite as the product of a late fifth- or early sixth-century Christian Neo-Platonist, possibly of Syrian provenance. The texts in question for the present discussion include the Celestial Hierarchy and the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, in which the graduated structure of spiritual progress is most systematically elaborated.

5  For the exegesis of the five porches and the two denarii, see e.g. Augustine, In Johannis Evangelium Tractatus, XVII, 6; and Quaestiones Evangeliorum, II, 31.

6  On the Rhineland mystics in this context, see the broad synthesis in Bernard McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (New York: Crossroad, 2005).

7  The incident is described in Possidius’ Vita Augustini. The homily in question is generally identified as Sermon 223A in the Dolbeau collection of newly-discovered Augustinian sermons. See François Dolbeau, Vingt-six sermons au peuple d’Afrique (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1996).

8  Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Ezechielem, I, VII, 8. The image is also taken up by Origen in the prologue to his Commentary on the Song of Songs. See this article: Scriptures Grow With us, The Experience of the Fathers of the Church

9  Origen, Commentary on the Gospel of John, I, 4-6. The image of the Beloved Disciple as the model of contemplative reading is a recurrent motif in the patristic and medieval tradition.

Bibliography

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Augustine of Hippo. In Johannis Evangelium Tractatus. PL 35. Ed. J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1841.

Augustine of Hippo. Quaestiones Evangeliorum. PL 35. Ed. J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1841.

Dolbeau, François, ed. Vingt-six sermons au peuple d’Afrique: retrouvés à Mayence. Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1996.

Gregory the Great. Homiliae in Ezechielem. PL 76. Ed. J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1849.

John of the Cross. The Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross. Trans. Kieran Kavanaugh OCD and Otilio Rodriguez OCD. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1991.

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