Jean Khoury

Summary: The book of Nahum announces the fall of Nineveh, an instrument of divine punishment which itself became the object of judgement when it exceeded the measure that had been assigned to it. This biblical law — a divine permission that is never arbitrary, but always ordered towards a design of purification — sheds light, by spiritual analogy, on the crisis that religious and monastic life has been undergoing since the middle of the last century. But history also teaches prudence: the fall of a system is not sufficient to produce the good that must follow it; a seed must already be prepared. Applied to Carmel, whose numbers have collapsed since 1965 without the profound causes of this crisis having truly been discerned, this principle may suggest that the path of renewal begins with a return to the source: not first of all with structural reform, but with a renewed rediscovery of the finality of the vocation. This is precisely the method of St Teresa of Avila, who never modifies an external form without first having clarified its inner meaning. This article proposes to follow this thread: from the biblical law of measured permission, to the necessity of preparing a renewal before the fall, and finally to the Teresian pedagogy which inseparably unites style of life and interior life — the glove and the hand — and which, from The Way of Perfection to The Interior Castle, progressively clarifies the ultimate ideal of the reform: transforming union, the source of a mysterious yet truly real apostolic fruitfulness for the Church.

Introduction

The following article is offered simply as a fraternal reflection. It does not seek to judge decisions already made, nor to propose a programme of reform. Rather, it wishes to return quietly to the sources of the Carmelite vocation, in the hope that a renewed contemplation of its finality may help illuminate the discernment that lies before us.

A verse from the prophet Nahum regarding Nineveh serves as the initial spark for this reflection. “Everyone who sees you will flee from you, saying: ‘Nineveh is destroyed! Who will mourn for her?’ Where can one find comforters for you?” (Nah 3:7). Here, Nineveh is brought to mind not to compare religious communities to an unfaithful city or to suggest divine punishment, but purely as a biblical analogy for how God permits major historical shifts and crises to clear the way for spiritual purification and deeper renewal. When viewed through this biblical lens, trials—even severe institutional contractions—are never arbitrary, but can become a grace-filled invitation to return to our founding roots.

Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian empire, had for a long time been the instrument of God’s punishment against unfaithful nations; but it had eventually become intoxicated by its own power, and its hour of judgement had come. This text opened a path of reflection which, step by step, led to questioning the crisis of religious and monastic life since the Second Vatican Council, and then, more precisely, the crisis of Carmel itself — its numbers in free fall since 1965, its houses closing one after another, and the the institutional responses which, despite good intentions, may not have fully addressed the deeper spiritual core of the challenge.

The present article gathers together this journey of thought in order to share it, in a structured and prayerful form, to the nuns themselves, as well as to those who carry responsibility for their formation. It is not a judgement made from the outside, but a meditation made from within the Carmelite tradition, with the sincere desire to shed light, to invite reflection, and to walk together towards a deeper renewal. For if the crisis is real, it is neither without remedy nor without hope: Scripture and the saints teach us that God never permits a trial without preparing, at the same time, the restoration which must follow it — provided that we know how to cooperate with it.

I. A Biblical Law of History: Divine Permission Is Measured, Never Arbitrary

The entire book of Nahum is devoted to announcing God’s judgement against Nineveh. For more than a century, Assyria had exercised an extremely violent domination over neighbouring nations, including Israel and Judah. The prophet Isaiah had already given the key to this domination: God himself had used Assyria as an instrument of punishment against his unfaithful people.

“Woe to Assyria, the rod of my anger… I send him against a godless nation… But he does not intend this… He only thinks of destroying.” (Is 10:5-7)

The text is of decisive importance: God sends Assyria, but Assyria itself does not act according to God’s intention; it absolutises its own power and seeks only destruction. This is why the same chapter immediately adds a limit:

“When the Lord has finished all his work on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem, he will punish the fruit of the arrogant heart of the king of Assyria.” (Is 10:12)

Divine permission therefore has a measure. It is never unlimited, and it is never given for its own sake: it is ordered towards a design of purification. St Augustine expresses this principle in a classical way:

“God almighty… would never permit any evil whatsoever to exist in his works, if he were not powerful and good enough to bring good out of evil” (Enchiridion, 11).

But we must take care: good does not automatically arise from permitted evil. God is capable of bringing it forth; yet it is still necessary to discern by what means, and to cooperate with him.

This same pattern appears, with an even more personal intensity, in Jesus’ words to Peter on the eve of the Passion:

“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan has demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat. But I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail; and when you have returned, strengthen your brothers” (Lk 22:31-32).

The Greek verb exēitēsato — “he has demanded you insistently” — indicates that Satan can act only within the limits of a permission, as in the prologue of the Book of Job (Job 1:12; 2:6). The intention of the enemy is always to destroy; the intention of God is always salvific. Christ does not remove Peter’s trial: he obtains for him the grace to pass through it and to emerge from it with a mission — “strengthen your brothers”.

What these three texts — Nahum, Isaiah, and Luke — teach together is a true law of Providence: a trial permitted by God always carries within itself its own limit, and this limit is ordered towards a purification which leads to a restoration and a greater mission. It is this law which gives meaning to the analogy that we would now like, with all the necessary prudence, to apply to the recent history of consecrated life.

II. The Void That Follows the Fall: The Lesson of St John Paul II

It would be naïve to believe that the end of a crisis occurs automatically as soon as a system collapses. Recent history offers an illuminating example. St John Paul II, a witness to the barbarity of Nazism and then to the ravages of communism, had hoped for and worked towards the fall of the latter. But when the Wall fell, he did not rejoice naïvely: he immediately warned against a new danger. In the encyclical Centesimus Annus, after welcoming the collapse of communist regimes, he wrote: “There is a danger that a radical capitalist ideology of the type which refuses even to consider these problems may spread.” (Centesimus Annus, 42)

What this text shows is of capital importance: a void left by the collapse of a system is not automatically filled by the good. If nothing has been prepared, another ideology quickly occupies the place. This is precisely what happened in several countries of the former Eastern bloc: in place of communism, an unrestrained liberalism and a capitalism without law invaded societies that were in no way prepared for them.

This lesson applies, by analogy, to the life of the Church and, particularly, to religious life. It would not be enough merely to observe that certain currents — intellectual, psychological, sociological or organisational — which have deeply marked consecrated life since the 1960s have reached their conclusion, or to wish for their collapse. The deeper question may rather be: what will be prepared when that moment comes? God, in Scripture, never works in a void: he always prepares a seed before the old order comes to an end — Moses before the Exodus, Daniel before the fall of Babylon, John the Baptist before the end of the Old Covenant, the Apostles gathered with Mary in the Upper Room before Pentecost. It is this same logic which may fruitfully guide our reflection on the future of contemplative life: not merely to discern what must come to an end, but to prepare, from now on, what must be born.

III. An Assessment of the Situation: Contemplative Life in Decline Since 1965

Since 1965, religious and monastic life has experienced, in a large part of the Western world, a considerable numerical collapse, and Carmel has not escaped this: from approximately 16,000 nuns, the Order has fallen to just over 7,000 today. The population is ageing, and the closures of Carmels continue, one after another. This reality, however painful it may be, must be faced with lucidity and charity, because there is no benefit in concealing it.

What is striking is that the institutional responses offered until now do not appear to have touched the root of the problem. Extending the length of formation — up to nine years in certain recent provisions — may have its usefulness if it corresponds to genuine spiritual maturation; but a longer formation does not, of itself, produce a deeper vocation. The question which precedes all others is not first of all “how long does it take to form a nun?”, but rather: “what is she being formed for, and towards what end is she being led?”

The real problem, one could suggest, does not lie first of all in structures, nor even solely in pressures coming from outside. It touches the meaning of Carmelite life itself: a clear awareness of a real apostolate, the effective establishment of a process of spiritual growth, the concrete means of this growth, and the coherence of the style of life which must sustain it. As long as this root is not touched, we will continue to reproduce the same errors, even if disciplinary adjustments are multiplied.

IV. St Teresa’s Method: Never Touch the Form Without Understanding the Substance

It is here that the figure of St Teresa of Avila becomes particularly instructive, because her reform never consisted in a simple rearrangement of external rules. She always begins by restoring the meaning: the goal, the finality, the manner of living, the means. The conciliar decree Perfectae Caritatis had already expressed this same requirement by calling, for every authentic renewal of religious life, for “a continuous return to the sources of all Christian life and to the original inspiration of the institutes” (Perfectae Caritatis, 2) — a return to the sources which must precede, and not follow, the adaptation of forms.

This conviction can be expressed through a simple but accurate image: the style of life is like a glove, and the spiritual life is like the hand. They are made for one another. The glove has no meaning without the hand which it receives; but the hand, in its concrete action, finds in the glove an appropriate expression. Between the two exists an almost sacramental bond: the visible sign of an invisible work of God.

The enclosure, silence, solitude, liturgy, poverty, the daily schedule, prayer, and fraternal life are therefore not practices inherited from the past, independent from one another or negotiable according to circumstances. They are signs which express, sustain and protect a precise inner path. This is why any modification of the style of life would benefit from first rediscovering the deeper meaning of each of its elements and its direct connection with the interior growth which it is intended to serve. To touch a form without having rediscovered the interior grace which it serves is to risk removing a means without yet having restored the spiritual reality which it expressed. To preserve a form without renewing the life which inhabits it leads, conversely, to an empty shell.

V. Why Such Radicality? The Meaning of Solitude and Silence at St Joseph’s

This requirement is verified in a particularly striking way when one asks why Teresa chose, for the monastery of St Joseph’s in Avila and for all those which followed, a style of life so different from that of the Monastery of the Incarnation: a radical solitude, a rigorous silence, and the constant invitation not to look outward but inward — inward into the monastery, but above all inward into the soul and the heart. Cut off from the world, without direct external apostolate, without multiplying contacts: for those who do not understand the reason for this, it can appear harsh, almost a form of torture.

Yet this radicality is not an end in itself; it proceeds from a very lofty vision of the contemplative vocation. What Teresa seeks to create at St Joseph’s is a true school of the interior, in which the gaze and desire can finally be directed entirely towards the one thing necessary. “We must not imagine that we are hollow within ourselves,” she writes as she begins The Interior Castle; the soul is a castle in which God himself dwells (Interior Castle, I, 1). The “interior” is therefore not a simple introspection: it is the theological space where God dwells, and to enter there is to enter the place where Christ remains.

The detachment from external things therefore expresses neither contempt for the world nor a refusal of apostolate or of the Church; it is a pedagogy of desire. The heart gradually learns to be freed from its many directions in order to become capable of a total attention to the Bridegroom. “Let your eyes be fixed on your Bridegroom,” she asks of her daughters in The Way of Perfection (2). It is the same evangelical choice as that of Mary of Bethany: “Mary has chosen the better part; it will not be taken from her” (Lk 10:42) — not a lesser activity, but a total availability.

One may perhaps see here a central point: if this reason for radicality is not understood, if one does not see and live the direct link between it and the interior life — the project, the growth, the goal, the union, the superior fruitfulness — there is a risk of gradually reducing or modifying it, modifying it little by little: less silence, more contacts, more activities, more openings. Yet every modification should first be examined by a single prior question: does this truly help the soul to enter more deeply into the indwelling Christ, or does it disperse the heart and weaken the very movement for which this form of life exists? Without this clarity, Carmelite radicality effectively becomes an absurd suffering; it is a sign that one is not made for this life, or that one has not yet received it in its truth.

VI. From The Way of Perfection to The Interior Castle: The Progressive Clarification of the Ideal

It is very instructive to follow the development itself of St Teresa’s expression of the finality of her reform, because this development directly illuminates the question of renewal today. At the beginning of her reform, responding to the request of her nuns who had just adopted a stricter style of life and wished her to speak to them about contemplation, Teresa wrote The Way of Perfection. From the first chapters, she establishes the goal of this new life: the observance of the Rule, and prayer for the “captains” of the Church — the priests, bishops and theologians who defend it.

“All occupied in praying for those who are the defenders of the Church and the preachers and theologians who support her.” (The Way of Perfection, 1)

The structure of The Way of Perfection, however, rests essentially upon a dynamic of correspondence between two actors: the effort of the soul (the virtues, vocal prayer, recollection — what tradition calls general assistance) and God’s response (contemplative graces, supernatural prayer — particular assistance). It is a doctrine already entirely oriented towards contemplation, but its structure remains, in a certain sense, static: it explains the interaction, without yet fully setting forth the ultimate ideal towards which this interaction is ordered.

Several years later, with the benefit of experience and the decisive contribution of her dialogue with St John of the Cross, Teresa wrote The Interior Castle. This book is not simply a pedagogical reformulation of The Way of Perfection; in the light of a mature spiritual experience, it constitutes a deeper explanation — almost a redefinition — of the very finality of the Carmelite vocation. The structure is no longer that of an interaction between two terms, but that of a progressive movement of interiorisation: an ascent which is, paradoxically, a descent towards the centre, towards the innermost dwelling place of the castle, where the King dwells and where he takes possession of the soul.

It is only then, in the seventh dwelling, that the ideal is fully revealed — and in a way that is unexpected in comparison with the tone of The Way of Perfection, where not all were presented as being called to explicit contemplation. Teresa writes:

“Consider, then, what His Majesty does to give us pledges of the love He bears us, and see whether you can fail to desire to reach this dwelling… may it not be through your fault that you do not arrive at this union.” (The Interior Castle, Seventh Dwelling)

This sentence marks a turning point. The ideal of the reform is now explicitly identified: spiritual marriage, transforming union, to which Teresa refuses that her daughters should consider themselves strangers in advance. It is no longer merely a correspondence between human effort and divine grace; it is a continuous growth, made of struggles, purifications, nights and interior battles, ordered towards a precise and attainable goal: spiritual marriage, whose fruitfulness, unlike any other grace, reaches a superior level. This is found again, with particular intensity, in St Thérèse of the Child Jesus, whose little way is nothing other than a renewed path towards this same summit.

Thus, from a still relatively static presentation of the interaction between the soul and God, Teresa comes, with age and experience, to a fully dynamic presentation of the Carmelite vocation: a journey towards the interior dwelling place of Christ, until the divine Fire takes possession of the whole soul, and the soul finally becomes capable of living fully its vocation of helping the captains of the Church.

VII. Mysterious Fruitfulness: Contemplative Apostolate at Its Summit

It is precisely in this transforming union that the contemplative vocation reveals all its ecclesial fruitfulness. The goal of Carmel is not merely that nuns pray for the Church as one intention among others; it is that they become, through their union with Christ, living instruments of his charity for his Church. The more the soul is transformed by God, the more its existence becomes a real participation in the work of salvation — not according to an effectiveness measured by human criteria, but according to a mysterious and yet truly real fruitfulness.

“For this you are here, my daughters; this is so that you may be the auxiliaries of Christ, to support this Bridegroom who is always at war,” Teresa writes in The Way of Perfection (3,5). And John of the Cross, with even more demanding language, describes the end of this journey: “The soul must be transformed into God through love, in such a way that it is God by participation” (Spiritual Canticle, B, stanza 22). It is this same mystery that St Thérèse of Lisieux expresses in her discovery of her vocation at the heart of the Church:

“In the heart of the Church, my Mother, I shall be Love” (Autobiographical Manuscripts, B, 3v).

Contemplative apostolate therefore reaches the summit of its effectiveness, not through a multiplication of external activities, but through the depth of union. This is the evangelical paradox of Carmel: the nun withdraws more in order to love more; she speaks less so that God may act more in her; she separates herself from the world not in order to abandon it, but in order to learn how to carry it, whole and entire, in the heart of Christ.

Practical Consequences

From this theological journey, several concrete implications arise, which it seems right to propose with humility to communities, formators, and all those who carry responsibility in discerning the renewal of Carmelite life:

Before any reform of structures — the length of formation, organisation, governance — it would be valuable to rediscover, and to help others rediscover, at every stage of formation, the precise theological finality of the contemplative vocation: not a generic prayer for the Church, but transforming union through charity, of which prayer and hidden apostolate are the fruit.

Any modification of an element of the style of life — enclosure, silence, solitude, daily schedule, austerity — would benefit from being preceded by a careful understanding of its connection with interior growth which it serves understood through a genuine spiritual pedagogy; otherwise, every form that is preserved becomes an empty shell, and every form that is removed deprives the soul of a means for which it does not yet possess an interior equivalent.

A renewed reading of the great masters of Carmel — Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Thérèse of Lisieux — may provide not only as sources of spirituality, but as a true pedagogical architecture: purification, knowledge of oneself before God, discernment of interior movements, the practice of prayer, the acceptance of nights, growth in the theological virtues, until perfect charity.

Rather than waiting for the end of a crisis, it may be wise to prepare already now what can succeed it: form, from now on, within each community, a small nucleus capable of carrying and transmitting this rediscovered vision, in the manner of the “faithful remnant” which God always raises up before each biblical restoration.

In the discernment of vocations and in the accompaniment of young nuns, distinguish true evangelical radicality — fruitful, desirable, ordered towards union — from a simple austerity that is misunderstood or poorly transmitted, which would lead only to exhaustion or incomprehension.

For superiors, formators and governing bodies of the Order, decisions concerning renewal may fruitfully begin with the question of meaning rather than only with questions of timing or structure — first asking, “What are we forming people for, and why?” before asking, “How long should it take, and according to what methods?”

Conclusion

The prophet Nahum announced that the power which had exceeded the measure of the mission received from God would, in its time, be judged and stripped of its power. This same principle, applied with all the necessary prudence to the history of consecrated life, invites us to hope that the crisis which contemplative life has been undergoing for several decades is not without a way forward. But history also teaches that the collapse of a system does not, by itself, produce the good which must succeed it: a seed must already be prepared, just as God always prepared the future before the old order came to an end.

For Carmel, this seed can only be a return to the living source of its own reform: that of St Teresa of Avila, who never touched an external form without first restoring its inner meaning. The style of life and the spiritual life are like the glove and the hand: one cannot understand one except in the light of the other, and it is from their rediscovered unity that an authentic renewal of momentum can be born. From The Way of Perfection to The Interior Castle, Teresa herself never ceased to deepen this truth, until she revealed, in the final dwelling, the ideal towards which the whole of Carmelite life is ordered: transforming union, whose fruitfulness, hidden from the eyes of the world, truly sustains the Church and her pastors.

May this meditation be received by the nuns, not as a judgement delivered from outside, but as a fraternal invitation to rediscover, with confidence and hope, the source from which their own vocation has never ceased to draw. For God, who has permitted the trial, is already preparing, for those who wish to cooperate with him, the time of renewal.