Jean Khoury
Summary: This presentation explains, on the authority of Scripture and the Church’s Living Spiritual Tradition — above all St John of the Cross — how the “Old Man” and the “New Man” named by St. Paul actually function within the one human person. Through a series of diagrams it locates each faculty of the soul, upper and lower, and shows how the Old Man draws mind and will into slavery to the senses, emotions and imagination, while the New Man, moved by grace, governs through the three theological acts of Faith, Hope and Love. Drawing further on St. Teresa of Avila’s distinction between natural “sweetness” and true “consolation”, the presentation closes with a practical and encouraging conclusion on how to test, purify and habitually renew these three acts, so that the New Man in us steadily grows as the Old Man correspondingly shrinks.
Introduction
Every soul earnest about growth in the spiritual life will, sooner rather than later, run into a disconcerting fact about itself: within the single “I” who prays, works, loves and sins, two contrary ways of functioning are at work, each pulling toward a different end. Scripture does not leave us to guess at this. St Paul names the two directly, and the Church’s Living Tradition — nowhere more precisely than in St John of the Cross — has spent centuries unfolding what he meant, until it becomes not merely an image for meditation but a working diagnosis of the human being under grace.
“For we know that our old man was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin.” (Romans 6:6)
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Corinthians 5:17)
“You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires.” (Ephesians 4:22)
St Paul is equally direct about what changed things: “In him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not performed by human hands. Your whole self ruled by the flesh [the Old Man] was put off when you were circumcised by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised [the New Man] with him through your faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead.” (Colossians 2:11–12)
Baptism, then, does not merely improve the old man; it puts him to death and raises up another. Yet daily experience — and every spiritual director confirms this from long practice — shows that the old man does not vanish from ordinary life simply because he has already been defeated in principle. He continues to make himself felt, contesting with the new man for the actual, moment-by-moment governance of thought, desire and love. Learning to recognise which of the two is acting in us at a given instant, and learning to strengthen the second at the expense of the first, is not a peripheral concern of the spiritual life: it is very nearly the whole of its practical content.
This is why the presentation that follows relies as heavily on diagrams as on argument. Words can describe the old man and the new man only one after the other; a diagram can hold them both before the eye at once, together with the faculties each one governs, so that the reader takes in at a glance what commentary can only approach step by step. Look at each figure slowly. Ask, of every element it maps, “where does this belong in me, and which of the two men presently governs it?” The diagrams are not illustrations added for interest — they are the argument, given a second and complementary form.
Before entering the diagrams themselves, it is worth stating plainly what is at stake, because the whole teaching returns to it in the end. The New Man functions by exercising the theological acts of faith, hope and love through the higher faculties of the soul, namely the intellect, memory and the will. These acts are made possible by the continual assistance of God’s grace, which He constantly bestows upon us. Each act allows an increase in the reception of God’s Grace and contributes to the growth and transformation of the New Man, leading him ever more deeply into communion with God. To learn these acts, to make them purely, and to repeat them until they become the settled disposition of the soul, is the whole positive content of Christian holiness. Everything that follows about the old man — the senses, the emotions, the imagination, and how they can usurp a government that belongs to grace alone — is described only so that it can be recognised and set aside, precisely in order to leave the theological acts free to do their proper work, purely and without admixture. Keep this goal in view as you read: every distinction that follows, every diagram, serves it.
The Two Ways of Functioning
Each being functions in a specific way. The New Man, by the action of the Grace of God, uses the upper part of the Soul — the rational soul (mind and will) — and activates it according to God’s way. God’s way is: Acts of Faith, of Hope and of Love. It is of the utmost importance to learn and excel in the practice of the theological acts of Faith, Hope and Love.
We need to learn that these acts are aimed at God, and how the Grace of God works in them. We need to learn to repeatedly make each of these acts.
– The Act of Faith allows us to see things in daily life as God sees them.
– The Act of Hope teaches us what God wants to give us and drives us to desire it. God wants to give Himself totally to us and be united with us.
– The Act of Love teaches us how to love God with His Love, His way, according to His means.
– The Act of Love teaches us how to love any human being the way God loves him.
On the other hand, the Old Man in us uses and pushes the rational soul to submit to the ways of functioning of the lower faculties: senses, emotions, imagination…
– It shuts us off from God’s light.
– It offers us other goals in life, other hopes, other pleasures.
– It keeps us selfish, limited in our way of loving.
Senses, emotions, imagination… essentially draw their way of functioning from the outer world (goals, means…).
In the following diagrams we will “see” more effectively how all this works.
First let us see the different faculties of our being and their areas of influence.
Let us notice the extremes:
– God who is at the centre of our being.
-The Outer World that can be reached by our five senses.
Each area has its own functioning designated by a & b for the upper parts of the soul (spirit, mind/will), and 1, 2, 3 for the lower parts (soul & body) :
As we can see in the following slide, the area of influence of the Old Man in us, designated by the red circle, goes roughly from the imagination to the five senses, through our emotions.
In themselves and by themselves these faculties are not evil. On the contrary, they are all created by God and good. It is their functioning that can be good or bad.
If their functioning idolises a created object, and draws the upper part (spirit, mind/will) to become enslaved by this created object, we are confronted hereby what St. Paul calls the Old Man’s behaviour.
In this case the human being seems to be split in two. The upper part (the rational and spiritual part) knows what is good but can’t do it – it is slave to the lower part which is commanding! “I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.” (Rom 7:18) “For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want.” (Gal 5:17)
The human being looks like a woman pregnant with twins who are fighting each other. The “New Man” and the “Old Man”. The more we activate the New Man’s way of thinking, aiming/desiring, loving, the more the Old Man, will correspondingly shrink.
Even in our spiritual life, we still have both ways of functioning. This results from the effort of our virtuous work, with the general help of God — and from what comes from God and will be refracted in our conscious part (mind, emotions, senses).
When we read St Teresa of Avila’s description of what we can feel (during prayer, for instance, or outside of it) she compares two “feelings” that can occur in us, but she underlines how different they are from each other. She offers this description in the Fourth Mansions, Chapter I, where she treats of “the difference between sweetness or tenderness in prayer and consolations.” She says that one can feel sweetness and one can feel consolations. Behind these words what matters is what they allude to, from where these feelings come and what is at stake in each one.
“it seems to me that we may describe assweetness what we get from our meditations and from petitions made to Our Lord. This proceeds from our own nature, though, of course, God plays a part in the process (and in everything I say you must understand this, for we can do nothing without Him). This spiritual sweetness arises from the actual virtuous work which we perform, and we think we have acquired it by our labours.”(4th Manions Chapter 1)
Speaking about the Consolations that come from God she says: “It seems to me that the feelings which come to us from Divine things are as purely natural as these, except that their source is nobler, although these worldly joys are in no way bad.” (4th Mansions Chapter 1)
“To put it briefly, worldly joys (pleasures)have their source in our own nature and end in God, whereas spiritual consolations have their source in God, but we experience them in a natural way and enjoy them as much as we enjoy those I have already mentioned, and indeed much more. ”
(4th Mansions Chapter 1)
The other “feeling” — a joy, a consolation, that comes from God, through the spirit — is refracted* into the upper part of the soul, and can be sometimes refracted, too, into the feelings and senses. This is the result of the action of the grace of God in us. St. Teresa of Avila does not offer this explanation herself. It is St John of the Cross, master of discernment, who offers it in his general teaching.
* “refracted”: because it is not the grace itself; it is like a created reflection of it that falls either in the mind, the imagination, or the emotions and senses.
Conclusion
Practical Conclusion
What, then, is asked of the reader who has followed this teaching to its end? Not admiration, and not even comprehension alone, but practice — daily, deliberate, repeated practice of the three theological acts, joined to a growing vigilance over their purity.
Concretely: several times a day, and especially at the first stirring of any strong sense-impression, emotion, or imaginative representation, stop and ask — is this movement rising from the upper part of my soul, moved by grace towards God as He truly is, or is it, in fact, the old man dressed in spiritual language, moved by what pleases the senses, flatters the imagination, or answers to some hidden self-interest?
Make the Act of Faith deliberately: choose, again and again, to see this moment, this person, this trial, as Jesus, present with you, sees it, rather than as feeling or appearance present it.
Make the Act of Hope deliberately: desire what Jesus wills to give — Himself, wholly, in union — rather than the lesser consolations, however legitimate in themselves, that the old man is always ready to substitute for Him. It is important then to exchange “hopes” for Hope.
Make the Act of Love deliberately, both towards Jesus and towards every person met, asking to love with God’s own love and by His own means, and not merely with the affection that temperament and sentiment supply on their own.
None of this asks for the destruction of the senses, emotions or imagination — the presentation has been clear throughout that these are good, created by God. What it asks is that they be governed rather than governing; that they serve the acts of Faith, Hope and Love rather than substitute themselves for those acts under a religious veneer, as when we mistake spiritual sweetness — which, St. Teresa says, proceeds from our own nature even when God is not absent from it — for the deeper consolation whose source is God alone. This discernment is delicate, and it is precisely why St. John of the Cross gives it his sustained attention: a soul that cannot tell the two apart will chase sweetness and mistake it for sanctity, while a soul that learns to distinguish them is set free to seek God for God’s own sake, in acts that are pure.
Final Conclusion
Carry this teaching with you, not as one more idea filed away, but as a lens through which every hour of ordinary life is now seen differently. The old man in us is patient, and he will not disappear because we have once read a presentation about him: he will return tomorrow through the same channels — a wounded feeling, a pleasing image, an appetite that wants indulging before it wants examining. But so, too, will the grace that raises the new man in us return, offered afresh at every instant, asking only to be met by a deliberate act of faith, of hope, and of love.
This is, in the end, a teaching about freedom. The soul enslaved to the lower part of itself is described by St. Paul in words that any honest person recognises: “I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out” (Romans 7:18). The soul that learns to make the theological acts purely, habitually, and with growing constancy is precisely the soul St Paul describes as raised with Christ (Colossians 2:12) — no longer double, no longer at war with itself in that same paralysing way, but increasingly single, increasingly given over to the New Man, who alone can see, hope and love as God does.
Do not be discouraged if the old man in you still shrinks slowly, or if today’s act of faith feels more laboured than yesterday’s. Growth of this kind is never accomplished in a day; it is the fruit of unhurried, faithful repetition — act upon act — until what once cost effort becomes “connatural”. Return to these diagrams often. Let them become as familiar as your own face, so that recognising the old man’s movements in yourself grows almost instinctive, and choosing the new man’s — the act of faith that sees as God sees, the act of hope that desires what God desires to give, the act of love that loves as God loves — becomes, little by little, no longer a decision made against resistance, but the very shape of how you live.
Read Also:
St. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel Books II and III where St. John of the Cross teaches spiritual persons what is the purity of the acts of Faith, Hope and Love.
You can also follow the Course “Reading and Studying St. John of the Cross” (see here)
The Two Systems of Christian Life
Purity of Heart in Spiritual Life
The Evil One in Spiritual Life (Temptation)
The Promised Land is Union with Christ: The Necessary Christian Reading of the Old Testament
The Forgotten Thelogical Act: Hope
Waking the Dead: The Resurrection as Present Reality, Not Deferred Hope
The Act of Hope: The Church’s Unfinished Business
The Object of Hope: From Beatific Vision to Union with Christ
The Distinctively Christian Hope