The Unfolding and the Depths: Towards a True Method of Theology

Jean Khoury

Summary: This essay argues that contemporary theology has quietly collapsed two distinct operations into one: the unfolding of history — the reconstruction of events, sources, and influences — and true development — the discernment of the one living mystery that these events progressively manifest. Following John Henry Newman’s insight that authentic development preserves identity through organic growth, I argue that theology, as currently taught and practised, possesses many auxiliary methods (historical, philological, literary, sociological) but no method that is properly its own. I propose that the missing theological method can only be recovered by attending to the one place where God’s self-communication is most transparently observed: the growth of grace within the human person, as charted by the great masters of the spiritual life. Drawing on St Thomas Aquinas’s account of wisdom, on Dei Verbum 8 and CCC 94, and finally on the sevenfold purification of Psalm 12:6, I sketch a hierarchy of depths — textual, historical, doctrinal, sapiential, and mystical — through which the theologian must pass, and I argue that the degree of a theologian’s own spiritual transformation conditions, and even measures, the depth of theological vision available to him. This, I suggest, is the true “scientific method” of theology: not a technique applied from outside, but a participation, through purification and charity, in the very mystery theology exists to understand.

Introduction

There is a fundamental difference between recounting facts and discerning their meaning. A historian gathers, verifies, and presents historical data — and even this is never entirely neutral, since the selection of facts, sources, and questions already reflects a methodology and often unconscious presuppositions. But if the historian stops there, the facts remain simply facts, and it is left to the reader to determine their significance. A further step is taken only when the historian relates events to one another, identifies turning points, and proposes an intelligible pattern. At that point description becomes interpretation: an attempt to uncover the meaning of history, not merely its sequence.

I want to argue that something very similar and, I think, something far more consequential, has happened in theology. Much contemporary theology has quietly become a history of theology. Instead of seeking the inner intelligibility and organic development of Christian doctrine, it too often limits itself to tracing how doctrines evolved: a chronology of ideas, influences, and controversies. This is not “development” in Newman’s sense, where doctrine unfolds according to an intrinsic theological logic while remaining identically the same in substance. It becomes, instead, little more than an account of historical evolution.

The difficulty is that the connections between these developments are so often left unexplored. Historical facts alone do not generate theological meaning. The moment we ask why these developments occurred, how they are organically related, and what they reveal about the mystery of faith, we move beyond historical description into theology itself — we begin, properly, to theologise. History provides the material; theology seeks its intelligibility. Without this second movement, theology risks being reduced to an archaeological account of past ideas rather than a living and coherent understanding of the deposit of faith.

This is the distinction I want to develop here: between telling the unfolding of history and performing a true development— which means first identifying a true development, and then knowing how to continue it. To do the second requires infinitely more than the skills required for the first. And I want to show that this distinction is not merely methodological. It is linked, at its root, to the spiritual life: the deeper we go, the better we find the veins of history, and we reach the deep vein of true development, instead of remaining on the surface of events, doctrines, and people.

I. The Unfolding of History and the Development of Doctrine

The unfolding of history asks: What happened? It reconstructs sequences of events, identifies influences, traces controversies, and explains why one formulation followed another. Its object is succession in time. It is fundamentally descriptive, even when it interprets causes. It tells us how a doctrine came to be expressed in a certain way, what debates surrounded it, and which historical circumstances shaped its articulation.

True theological development asks a different question: What is the inner logic that has been unfolding through these historical events? It is not satisfied with chronology. It seeks intelligibility. It asks whether successive formulations are merely different historical expressions, or whether they reveal the progressive manifestation of one and the same mystery.

This is precisely where Newman remains indispensable. Development is not simply change over time; it is the gradual disclosure of an interior principle already present from the beginning. As he writes, “From the nature of the human mind, time is necessary for the full comprehension and perfection of great ideas” (An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Introduction). Newman does not say that time produces truth. He says that time allows the Church to penetrate more deeply into a truth already given in Revelation. And, as he says elsewhere in the same Essay, “here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often” — but the change he has in mind preserves identity; it is organic growth, not substitution.

The distinction, then, can be set out plainly:

The unfolding of history follows the movement of events; development follows the movement of truth.
The unfolding observes external succession; development discovers internal coherence.
The unfolding is concerned with chronology; development is concerned with ontology.
The unfolding belongs primarily to the historian; development belongs properly to the theologian.

A historian can produce an excellent history of Trinitarian doctrine without necessarily entering deeply into the mystery of the Trinity itself. A theologian cannot. To recognise authentic development, one must perceive the intrinsic relationships that unite apparently disparate moments of history — one must recognise the same living principle expressing itself under different historical forms.

II. The Depths: From Facts to Wisdom

This recognition requires a very different intellectual habit than historical expertise supplies. It requires what the medievals called sapientia. Wisdom is not the accumulation of information but the capacity to judge everything according to its highest cause. St Thomas Aquinas defines it exactly so: wisdom is “the knowledge that judges according to the highest causes” (Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 45, a. 1). The historian judges according to historical causality; the theologian judges according to the mystery of God. Theological development, therefore, cannot simply be produced by historical expertise. It requires contemplative intelligence.

I want to distinguish, provisionally, four depths.

The first depth is historical: we know the facts. The second depth is conceptual: we understand the arguments and categories employed. The third depth is organic: we perceive the internal architecture that unites the whole tradition. The fourth depth is sapiential: we see why this architecture exists, because we begin to participate in the reality it expresses.

I find geology a helpful image here. Someone walking across a mountain sees only successive layers of rock. The geologist perceives the structures beneath the surface. But an expert in tectonics understands the immense forces that generated the entire range. In the same way, historical theology often observes only the visible strata of Christian doctrine. Genuine speculative theology seeks the deep veins running through the whole tradition — the permanent principles that give rise to these successive expressions. Those veins are not historical accidents. They are the permanent mysteries of Christ, the Trinity, grace, the Church, the Holy Spirit, and the economy of salvation. History manifests them; it does not create them.

This is why genuine development becomes increasingly difficult the deeper one goes. It demands philosophical penetration, doctrinal synthesis, an instinct for the analogia fidei, fidelity to Revelation, and, ultimately, holiness. As Balthasar observed, “Only love is credible” — and in a theological context, only the mind purified by charity fully enters into the intelligibility of Revelation. This may explain why some periods of the Church produce extraordinary theological developments and others do not. The great theologians — Athanasius, Augustine, Maximus the Confessor, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Newman — were not simply historians of previous doctrines. They perceived the inner dynamism of the mystery entrusted to the Church and gave it deeper, more coherent expression. Their work was not merely an account of doctrinal evolution; it was itself an authentic moment in that development.

History unfolds by the succession of events; doctrine develops by the Church’s growing participation in the mystery of Christ through the Holy Spirit. The former can be studied externally; the latter can only be understood fully from within. This is why theology, at its highest level, is inseparable from the spiritual life — it is, as St Anselm said, fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. Faith is not merely theology’s starting point; it is the living principle that enables theology to perceive the organic unity and true development of the mysteries it studies.

III. Theology Has No Method Proper to Itself

Here I want to press the point further than is usually pressed, and to correct a formulation I initially allowed myself to be led into. It is not enough to say that theology has a method, borrowed or otherwise. The stronger and more precise thesis is this: theology does not, at present, possess a method proper to itself. What passes for the “scientific method” in theology — establishing texts, reconstructing contexts, tracing influences, describing the historical unfolding of ideas — is not a theological method at all. It is a historical method, applied to theological material. History, philology, literary criticism, sociology, philosophy: these are auxiliary disciplines. They illuminate Revelation from outside. They do not provide theology with its own proper mode of knowing.

This is not without precedent in the tradition. St Thomas held that every science should proceed according to the nature of its object, and that sacred doctrine (sacra doctrina) is unique precisely because its object is God under the aspect of Revelation: “Sacred doctrine is a science” (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 1, a. 2) — but a science of a different kind, proceeding from principles revealed by God rather than principles discovered by human reason. Theology, then, cannot simply imitate the methods of other sciences without risking a mismatch between method and object.

Every discipline should derive its method from its object. Physics studies matter; its method is experimental. History studies past events; its method is historical. Linguistics studies language; its method is philological. What does theology study? Not texts as such, not historical events as such, not religious consciousness, not even doctrines considered as historical artefacts. Its formal object is God revealing Himself and communicating His own life to humanity. If method is proportioned to object, then a genuinely theological method must arise from the mode of God’s self-communication.

This is exactly why the spiritual life becomes decisive. The privileged place where God communicates Himself is the life of grace. The privileged place where we can observe the laws of divine action is the development of holiness. If theology wishes to discover its own proper method, it must begin by studying the way God actually acts — and this is not, in the first instance, a historical question, but a contemplative one.

IV. What the Twentieth-Century Theologians Did Not Give Us

When the great theologians of the last century rediscovered the Fathers of the Church — de Lubac, Daniélou, Congar, Balthasar, Ratzinger — all they had in front of them were texts, facts, elements of history. They implicitly used their faith to see the connections between what they were reading, and they offered us their reading. They used a method — but only implicitly. They never devised a method, a proper method. We have received their analyses and their works, their understanding of the facts, but not a true method as such. They used, as a first layer, the scientific method to establish critical editions of texts, going back to reliable manuscripts. But the way they read was not through the scientific method. It was a hidden method, implicitly exercised but never explained, never handed on as such.

This matters because each generation must do its own part in theology — in the understanding of the faith — and to do so is to enter into the correct law, or laws, of true development, as Newman first noticed it. One thing is to check whether a development is genuine; another is to be able to engender a true development. We need the method. And each generation needs to do its part — as individuals belonging to the one Church, and as the community that composes the “Church of today,” according to its needs.

I see in the development of the grace of God in the human being — leading him to union with Jesus and the fullness of love, with its own line of growth, its turning points, as described by St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Avila — the true line of development of Christian doctrine. It is the criterion, the guiding line. The goal of creation and redemption is the human being, not history, not the unfolding of events, not a development that stays on the surface. The true goal is the human being’s journey of total transformation. Transformation here — sanctification, divinisation — is the line of true development. We have no other goal to achieve. “God’s will is your sanctification” (1 Thessalonians 4:3).

We need to find, and refine, the line of reading and interpreting that the theologians of the last century embodied but did not formalise. This is the method in theology. A good analysis of a patristic text can be performed at different levels and from different angles of approach — and all of this together is “the method,” or rather, the methods. We cannot lean on the scientific method alone. It remains of absolute necessity — establishing critical editions, understanding the direct meaning of a text, doing exegesis. But then we need something like biblical theology, and beyond that something like biblical spiritual theology. These are levels of depth. The deeper we enter into the spiritual life, the deeper our reading and interpreting becomes.

V. The Conciliar Foundation: Dei Verbum and the Catechism

This is not merely a private intuition; it has conciliar support. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, at CCC 94, drawing on Dei Verbum 8, states that the understanding of the heritage of faith grows in the life of the Church “through the contemplation and study of believers who ponder these things in their hearts,” “through the intimate sense of spiritual realities which they experience,” and “through the preaching of those who have received… the sure charism of truth.” Dei Verbum 8 itself is even clearer: this growth in understanding happens “through the contemplation and study made by believers… through the intimate understanding of spiritual things which they experience, and through the preaching of those who have received through episcopal succession the sure gift of truth.”

Notice what this means. The Council does not say that theology alone develops the understanding of Revelation, nor does it privilege historical scholarship. It places spiritual experience alongside theological study as one of the principal means by which the Church enters more deeply into Revelation. Revelation itself does not change; the Church’s understanding grows, and this growth is attributed explicitly to the Holy Spirit. St Thomas had already distinguished knowledge by reasoning from knowledge by connaturality: wisdom judges divine things “through a certain connaturality with divine things” (Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 45, a. 2). This is almost exactly what the Council is describing.

The question this raises is unavoidable: what are the laws governing this experiential understanding? That is precisely what St Teresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, St Bonaventure and the other masters of the spiritual life have spent centuries studying — not merely describing religious experience, but discerning the inner laws by which grace unfolds within the human person: continuity through purification, permanence through transformation, increasing explicitness without loss of identity. These are exactly the characteristics Newman recognised in authentic doctrinal development. History presents only external succession; spiritual theology reveals interior causality. It shows not merely that something has changed, but how the same divine life unfolds organically through successive stages.

Spiritual Theology, then, should not be regarded as one specialised discipline among many. It provides theology with its deepest methodological principles, because it studies the primary mode of God’s action — the field of operation in which the Holy Spirit’s work is most immediately visible: the soul. Only after learning to recognise the organic laws of divine growth in the individual can theology hope to recognise those same laws in the life of the Church, in the unfolding of doctrine, and in the history of salvation. Dei Verbum states that experiential knowledge contributes to the development of doctrine, but it does not ask how this experiential knowledge operates, nor does it formulate a theological method upon it. That is the gap this proposal seeks to address.

VI. The Method That Emerges

Drawing all of this together, I can now state the principle plainly: the method of a discipline must arise from the nature of its object. History studies events, and proceeds historically. Philology studies texts, and proceeds philologically. Philosophy studies being through reason, and proceeds rationally. Theology studies God’s self-revelation and self-communication. Its method, therefore, must arise from the way God reveals and communicates Himself.

God does not reveal Himself by depositing isolated propositions. He acts. Revelation is a living divine action unfolding in history and culminating in Christ, and this action possesses an intrinsic organicity — it unfolds according to an interior principle. Where can this principle be observed most clearly? Not first in historical events, not first in doctrines, but in the place where God’s action reaches its goal: the human person. The centre of Revelation is not history. The centre of Revelation is the transformation of the human person into Christ. History exists for that transformation. Doctrine exists for it. The sacraments exist for it. The Church exists for it. Everything converges on what St Paul calls “your sanctification.”

This gives the method its first principle: the development of grace within the human person is the primary hermeneutical key for understanding every other development in theology. The saints cease to be merely examples of Christian life; they become privileged witnesses of the very mode according to which God acts. St Teresa does not merely describe prayer — she identifies laws. St John of the Cross does not merely narrate mystical experience — he identifies the principles governing purification and growth. St Bonaventure does not merely describe the ascent to God — he identifies its structure. These are not spiritual observations only; they reveal the grammar of divine action.

From this follows a hierarchy of depths, or an ascending and descending hermeneutic, through which every theological object can be read:

Textual and critical — establishing what was said.
Historical — explaining when, where, and why it was said.
Doctrinal — relating what was said to the unity of the faith.
Sapiential — discerning the organic logic of Revelation.
Mystical or spiritual — contemplating the action of the Holy Spirit that generates that organic logic in the first place.

These are not competing methods but ordered depths of one theological act. The higher does not abolish the lower; it presupposes and perfects it. The philological and historical disciplines remain indispensable, but they are preparatory. Their work reaches fulfilment only when taken up into sapiential understanding.

Development, on this account, is no longer primarily analogous to the evolution of ideas. It becomes analogous to the maturation of a living organism — an entirely different model, and a profoundly Christological one. St Paul speaks of growth “to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13): here the development of the Church is measured not by history but by conformity to Christ. If sanctification is the final cause of creation and redemption, it should also illuminate theological method. Theology ought to read every doctrine, every council, every patristic text, every dogmatic formulation according to this finality — asking not only “What does this text say?” or “How did this doctrine arise?” but “How does this serve the transformation of humanity into Christ?” This is a genuinely teleological method.

The theological method, so understood, can be defined as the disciplined discernment of the organic action of the Holy Spirit, beginning from His transformative work within the human person and extending analogically to His action in Scripture, Tradition, doctrine, liturgy, and the life of the Church. It is neither purely deductive nor purely historical. It is contemplative, analogical, teleological, organic, sapiential. It constantly asks: What is the living principle? How does it grow? What remains identical? What becomes more explicit? What is the goal towards which everything moves? These are not historical questions. They are questions about life.

Christ is not simply the object of this theology; He is its form. The Incarnate Word is the pattern according to which Revelation unfolds, the measure according to which doctrine develops, and the end towards which grace leads every person. The deepest theological method is nothing other than learning to think according to the form of Christ’s own life as it is prolonged in the Church by the Holy Spirit — which is why the saints are not merely authorities to be cited, but the privileged epistemic witnesses of theology, since in them the logic of Christ’s own life becomes historically visible and intellectually discernible.

VII. The Sevenfold Purification: Psalm 12 and the Stages of Theological Vision

I want to press this to its final and most concrete expression. “And the words of the Lord are flawless, like silver purified in a crucible, like gold refined seven times” (Psalm 12:6). This verse is itself a method. To learn to practise theology, one has to grow spiritually. To each of seven stages of the transformation of our being corresponds a level of understanding of the text, of Scripture, of the Word of God. In this sense theological education has seven stages of growth, perception, and understanding.

The first is the use of the mind under the natural light of reason. The second is the general light of faith — already conditioned by the purification of intention, patience, charity, and the willingness to accept mystery without rushing to conclusions. The third is beginning to experience the risen Lord in the Holy Spirit — what St Teresa of Avila calls the Fourth Mansions, at the beginning of which she says, “here start the supernatural things,” and begs the Lord to help her explain His working in us. The fourth is receiving ever greater graces, grace upon grace, reaching the union of the will described in the Fifth Mansions, where the vital importance of charity becomes evident — and this transforms one’s vision of any text one reads. As St Augustine says, the whole Bible sings God’s love; one needs this degree of transformation to see it.

The fifth stage is the move from the human mode of seeing, acting, and loving to the divine mode, through the dark night of the spirit. Here new things unfold, utterly unseen before. There is continuity, as Newman insists, but also a radical leap from the human to the divine modality — and here the presence and help of Our Lady is unique, so that our eyes open to her presence throughout Scripture. Then comes spiritual betrothal, and spiritual marriage, unfolding realities unheard of before, even though they were already present before our eyes. Then the flaming begins — the spark where the transformed spirit, now on fire, and the Holy Spirit send flames, acts of immense value for the Church; the entire Scripture is transfigured again in front of us. Then comes participation in the Passion of the Lord, where the works of Incarnation and Redemption take on an entirely different impact, light, and understanding. Finally comes Christian death, undergone out of love.

All of these are stages in one’s capacity to exercise theology. Theology and spiritual growth are therefore intimately related, and together compose the true method — a demanding method, an open method, capable of growth and improvement, but a true method nonetheless. This is very far from the “scientific method” as commonly understood. And yet I am inclined to call this — the development of the method of theology I have been describing — the true “scientific method” in theology, in the classical sense of scientia: disciplined knowledge proceeding from principles proper to its own object.

Every subject in theology now has to be studied and understood bearing in mind who writes, about what, and with what degree of transformation the author writes — because this determines the level, the quality, and the limits of his standing point. The interpretation of Revelation is conditioned by the transformation of the interpreter. This is not subjectivism: the objective mystery of Revelation does not change according to private experience. Rather, the objective mystery can only be progressively perceived according to the degree of participation in the divine life. The image of Psalm 12 is exact: the Word itself does not change; what changes is the capacity of the reader to perceive its richness. The seven refinements are not degrees of perfection in the text but degrees of transformation in the one who reads it.

Practical Consequences

If this diagnosis is correct, the renewal of theology cannot consist simply in adding another course or another discipline. It requires a renewal of theological epistemology — of how theology knows. Several concrete consequences follow.

Theology must become conscious of its own operations. At present it performs two different operations without distinguishing them: the historical (establishing texts, contexts, influences, chronology) and the theological (perceiving unity, judging development, recognising analogies, discerning the action of God). The first is explicitly taught; the second is assumed but rarely analysed. Theology needs not only a history of doctrine but a phenomenology of theological understanding itself — an account of what the theologian actually does when he truly understands.

Theological education must recover the distinction between analysis and synthesis. Modern scholarship is extraordinarily good at breaking reality into its constituent parts. This is necessary, but theology cannot stop there. Students must also be trained in the opposite movement — asking what unites the parts, what interior principle gives coherence to the whole, and how each element participates in the single mystery of Christ.

Spiritual Theology must cease to be treated as one specialised discipline among many. Since Dei Verbum 8 and CCC 94 identify the lived experience of grace as one of the very means by which the Church’s understanding of Revelation grows, the writings of St Teresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, St Bonaventure, St Thérèse of Lisieux and others should not simply illustrate a course in spirituality — they should help form the theologian’s very way of knowing.

Theology should explicitly teach its levels of reading — philological, historical, doctrinal, spiritual, sapiential — as increasing depths of penetration into a single text, not as competing interpretations, so that students become conscious of moving from one to another rather than mistaking one level for the whole.

Every theological question should be habitually related to its teleological end. Alongside “What does this doctrine mean?” theology should ask, as a matter of method, “How does this doctrine participate in God’s work of conforming humanity to Christ?” This places every inquiry within the economy of salvation, not merely within the history of ideas.

Theological formation cannot be separated from spiritual formation. Since charity perfects the intellect, and since the saints perceive the inner coherence of Revelation because they participate existentially in what theology studies, the theologian should not merely study grace — he should allow himself to be transformed by it. Otherwise theology risks becoming the study of a life not yet lived.

Theology should attempt to formulate, and not merely assume, the laws of authentic development. Newman gave us the notes by which a genuine development may be recognised after the fact. The further task — learned above all from the spiritual masters — is to understand how such developments are actually engendered: through continuity, purification, organic growth, increasing simplicity, deeper unity, and fuller conformity to Christ.

Conclusion

Since the nineteenth century, theology has devoted immense effort to recovering its sources — the ressourcementmovement was indispensable, and it gave us back the Fathers, the great councils, the primary texts of the tradition. But recovering the sources is not the last word. The next stage is different: it is not enough to recover the Fathers; we must recover the way in which the Fathers, the great medieval theologians, and the twentieth-century masters actually came to understand what they read. Theology has largely recovered its texts but has not yet fully reflected on its own deepest act of knowing.

What I have tried to trace here is the shape that reflection should take. The unfolding of history and the true development of doctrine belong to different orders of knowledge, and the historical-critical paradigm — indispensable as it is — cannot by itself cross from the one to the other. What crosses that threshold is wisdom: the capacity to judge by the highest cause, exercised by a mind purified by charity. And the clearest place to observe the laws by which such wisdom is formed is not the archive but the soul — the organic, ordered, often costly growth of grace as it draws a person from the natural light of reason, through the general light of faith, into the supernatural touch of the Fourth Mansions, through union of will, through the dark night that carries the soul from a human to a divine mode of knowing, through betrothal and marriage and the flame of the Spirit, to participation in the Passion and, finally, to a death that is itself an act of love.

Newman taught us how to recognise authentic development once it has occurred. The spiritual doctors teach us the laws according to which authentic development occurs in the first place. To unite these two insights is, I believe, to recover something theology has largely lost: not a technique to be applied from outside its object, but a method that arises from the object itself — from the living God who communicates Himself, and who is, in the end, the only proper subject theology has ever had. This is the true “scientific method” of theology: the gradual transformation of the knower, so that the Word — already flawless, already pure gold — may be perceived, at last, according to the fullness in which it was always given.

Addendum I

Theology and Mystical Experience: The Unity of Knowledge and Union with God

The following quotation demonstrates the profound relationship between spiritual growth and the contemplation of the mystery of God: the Trinity and the Incarnate Son. In the Seventh Mansions, St. Teresa of Avila offers this luminous affirmation: “What we believe through an act of faith, the soul grasps here, one might say, with its own eyes.” (7M 1,6) (“de manera que lo que tenemos por fe, allí lo entiende el alma, podemos decir, por vista“.)

This statement reveals the deep unity between theology and the spiritual life: as the soul advances towards union with God, its contemplation of the divine mysteries becomes increasingly profound. Theological truths are not merely concepts received externally; they become realities perceived through participation in divine life.

A similar unity can be observed in St John of the Cross’s Living Flame of Love. At the end of his commentary on the third stanza, St John reproduces several passages from a work anciently attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas. Here again, we encounter a remarkable convergence between the highest reaches of spiritual experience, which St. John is describing, and the theological understanding expressed in the text attributed to St. Thomas.

At the summit of the spiritual mountain, theology and mystical experience are not opposed but profoundly united. The theologian contemplates the mysteries of God, and the soul transformed by grace enters into a lived participation in those same mysteries. This is the marvellous unity revealed at the heights of the journey: theology becoming contemplation, and contemplation revealing the deepest dimensions of theology.

The Vision Behind the Words: Theological Perception and the Witness of the Saints

This also explains why a man such as St. Athanasius was ready to suffer exile and persecution for what might appear to be a single word, even an “iota”, in the Creed. In reality, his defence of the Nicene faith led him into exile five times. Why would he endure such suffering for a theological formulation?

The answer is that, for Athanasius, this was not merely a question of words. Because he was a saint and a bishop entrusted with the care of the faith, he had received a profound interior perception of the mystery he was defending. He did not see only concepts or formulas; he perceived the divine reality signified by those formulas. The words of the Creed were not abstract propositions for him. They were the expression of the mystery of Christ Himself. To alter them was not simply to modify language; it was to obscure the reality of salvation revealed in the Incarnate Word.

The same can be said of St. Maximus the Confessor. He endured imprisonment, exile and brutal torture because of his refusal to accept Monothelitism, which compromised the full reality of Christ’s human will. He died as a result of the extreme sufferings he endured after being exiled to the Black Sea region. Traditionally, he is called a “Confessor” because he did not receive martyrdom through an immediate execution, but rather through the prolonged suffering caused by his fidelity.

Why would such saints accept such treatment? Was it merely for theological terminology? Was it only for words?

No. They saw.

They saw the reality contained within the words.

Their defence of doctrine came from an interior vision born of faith transformed by charity. They perceived that the language of the Creed was inseparable from the mystery it expressed. This is why authentic theological development cannot be reduced to the analysis of texts and concepts. It requires a vision of the reality towards which the words point.

This is analogous to the preparation of the iconographer. The iconographer does not simply reproduce an image according to artistic technique. Before writing the icon, he enters into prayer, fasting, purification and contemplation. He must first receive, inwardly, the mystery that he is called to express outwardly. The icon is not merely an artistic representation; it is a testimony of a reality contemplated in faith.

Something similar applies to the theologian and, in a particular way, to the priest. In the early centuries, the preparation for priestly ministry was understood as a profound transformation of the person. The future priest needed time of prayer and purification (forty days retreat) before beginning his mission because he was called to become, through the action of the Holy Spirit, a living instrument through whom God would write His word in the hearts of His people. Before proclaiming the mystery, he had to be transformed by the mystery. Before teaching divine things, he had to learn to contemplate them. “You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.” (2 Corinthians 3:2–3)

This principle applies to theology itself. The theologian must not merely analyse the mysteries of faith from the outside. He must first allow those mysteries to take possession of him, to transform his way of seeing, thinking and loving. The deeper the transformation, the deeper the theological perception.

This is beautifully illustrated by St. Augustine at the end of his life when he wrote his Retractationes. This work was not simply a correction of earlier writings. It was the testimony of a man who, having grown in wisdom and holiness, could now see more deeply than he had seen before. He revisited his earlier works from the perspective of a more mature understanding, recognising both what remained true and what required further clarification. The same Augustine who wrote earlier in life could now read his own writings with greater light because he himself had been transformed. The development of theology therefore cannot be separated from the development of the theologian. As the saint grows in conformity to Christ, his capacity to perceive, understand and express the mystery also grows.

At the summit, there is no opposition between doctrine and holiness, between theology and contemplation, between faith expressed in words and faith experienced in life. The saint is able to defend a word of the Creed because he sees the infinite reality contained within that word.

Addendum II

The following text is an attempt to illustrate how personal experience — holiness — and theology are very much united in St. John, and how theology needs the personal experience, decanted.

The Word Pitched His Tent in Us

A reading of the Johannine Prologue in light of the Indwelling

For a long time I read John 1:14 the way everyone reads it: as the verse of the Incarnation. “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” — I took this as the theological summit of the Prologue, the moment the eternal Logos assumed a human nature, the doctrinal anchor that St. Athanasius and St. Augustine and the whole patristic tradition rightly defended against every denial of Christ’s true humanity. I still hold that tradition in the highest respect. But the more closely I read the sequence of the Prologue itself, the more I became convinced that this verse is not doing what we have assumed it does — and that our habit of isolating it from what surrounds it has quietly distorted how we hear the rest of John’s Gospel.

The coming has already happened

Look at the order of the text. Verse 11 already tells us: “He came to his own home, and his own people received him not.” The verb is aorist — a completed action. The Word’s coming into the world, his historical presence among Israel, his rejection: all of this is stated before verse 14. If the Incarnation is what verse 14 announces, then the Prologue has an odd structure indeed — it would mention the Word’s arrival in history, then his rejection, then, several verses later, get around to explaining that he had, in fact, become flesh. That is not how a carefully composed text usually works, and John’s Prologue is anything but careless. Every clause in it is placed with theological intention.

The natural way to read verses 9 through 13 is as a single unfolding: the true light was coming into the world; he was in the world; the world did not know him; he came to his own; his own did not receive him. But then — and this is the hinge the tradition tends to walk past too quickly — verse 12 opens a second possibility: to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God. And verse 13 tells us how this happens: not by blood, not by the will of the flesh, not by the will of man, but by God. This is a birth. It is the birth “from above” that Jesus will later explain to Nicodemus in chapter 3. It happens to those who receive the Word who has already come and already been made known. It happens, in other words, before verse 14.

So when verse 14 says “the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us, and we saw his glory” — whose flesh is this dwelling? The grammar allows, and the sequence practically requires, a startling answer: the flesh of those who received him in verses 12–13. Sarx, “flesh,” need not be read as shorthand for “Jesus’ individual human nature” alone. In the flow John has built, flesh is what we are — humanity itself, now inhabited. The Word does not merely arrive and put on a body; the Word pitches his tent, makes his dwelling, in us, in the flesh of those born of God. This is why we, and not Jesus alone, see the glory. Glory, in John, is never a private attribute someone possesses in isolation; it is always something manifested to and in others. We could not see it unless it had first been given to dwell in us.

The tabernacle language points forward, not only back

The word John chooses for “dwelt” — eskēnōsen, “pitched his tent” — deliberately echoes the tabernacle in Exodus, where God’s glory took up residence among Israel in a tent that could be struck and moved. It is tempting to stop there, to say: John simply means that God’s presence, once housed in a tent of skins, is now housed in the flesh of Jesus. But John never leaves an Old Testament image sitting still; he always drives it forward into what Jesus himself will say later in the Gospel. And what Jesus says later, in chapters 14 through 16, is not “I have pitched my tent among you” but “we will come to him and make our home with him” (14:23), “abide in me, and I in you” (15:4). The tent, for John, was never going to stay a fixed structure standing among the disciples for thirty-three years and then departing at the Ascension. The tent is the believer. The indwelling promised in chapter 14 is not a new theme introduced late in the Gospel; it is the fulfillment of what chapter 1 already announced. John 14–16 is not a commentary added onto the Prologue — it is the key that unlocks what the Prologue was saying all along.

Why “we saw his glory” cannot simply mean “we watched a man”

This is where the traditional reading runs into its deepest difficulty. If “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” refers only to Jesus’ individual Incarnation — God assuming a body that walked through Galilee — then “we saw his glory” ought to mean something like: the disciples watched Jesus perform miracles, and in doing so glimpsed his divine identity shining through. But this is not how John himself uses the word glory. Twice in this Gospel John tells us explicitly what “seeing his glory” means, and neither time is it a reference to visible wonder-working.

In 12:23 Jesus says the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified — and the “hour” throughout this Gospel is always the hour of the Cross. In 12:41, immediately after quoting Isaiah’s word that the people did not believe, John writes that Isaiah spoke this “because he saw his glory.” The prophet John invokes is not the Isaiah of chapter 6, who saw the Lord high and lifted up on a throne. It is the Isaiah of chapter 53, the prophecy of the Suffering Servant, quoted just above in the same passage. For John, the glory that Isaiah saw — the glory the disciples saw — is the glory of the Servant who suffers, is despised, and is finally exalted precisely through his humiliation. Glory, in John’s vocabulary, is revealed on Golgotha, not on Tabor.

And this, I think, is also why John — who according to the Synoptics was present at the Transfiguration, one of the three witnesses to that dazzling revelation of light — never once mentions it. It is not an oversight. It is a deliberate silence. John does not need to narrate a fading glimpse of glory on a mountain that vanished once the cloud lifted, because his entire Gospel exists to lead us into a glory that does not fade: the glory of the Crucified, and the glory of Christ dwelling permanently within those who receive him. The Transfiguration was temporary. The indwelling is not. John replaces the mountain with the Cross, and replaces a private vision granted to three disciples with an offer extended to everyone who believes.

The parallel is not only thematic; it is structural. The scene at Cana (1:51–2:11) mirrors the shape of the Transfiguration: a promise of vision (“you will see heaven opened,” 1:51), a hidden fulfillment (the sign at the wedding), and a veiled reference to seeing (the glory manifested in the changing of water into wine). And this promise of the opened heaven finds its true fulfillment not on a mountain but at the piercing of Jesus’ side on the Cross (John 19), from which the servants — the Church — draw the new wine of the Kingdom. The whole Gospel is built on this single substitution: what the Synoptics locate on the mountain, John relocates to the Cross and to the heart of the believer.

What this does — and does not — mean for the Incarnation

I want to be precise here, because it would be easy to hear this as a denial of the Incarnation, and it is not that. The Word truly became flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth; this remains, as the Fathers insisted, the non-negotiable foundation of everything else. Without the Word first taking on our nature in the womb of Mary, there is no flesh for him to dwell in later, no humanity capable of receiving the kind of indwelling chapters 14 through 16 describe. The Incarnation is presupposed by verses 9 through 13; it is not absent from the Prologue.

But it is not what verse 14 is announcing. What the Fathers rightly defended as doctrine, John’s own sequence places earlier and treats, in a sense, as settled ground — the premise, not the punchline. The punchline of the Prologue, the thing John actually wants us to notice and marvel at, is that the Word who had already come into the world, already been rejected by some and received by others, already begotten children of God in those who believed — that this same Word goes on to pitch his tent in those very people, so that they, made his dwelling, might see his glory. The Incarnation, for John, is not the glorious event in itself. What is glorious is that God can dwell in human flesh at all — not only in the flesh of Jesus, but in ours. This is why the whole Gospel exists: not to prove a doctrine about who Jesus is in the abstract, but to draw us into becoming, ourselves, his temple.

Even the textual history of verse 13 supports this reading. The majority of manuscripts read it in the plural — “who were born… of God,” referring to believers reborn from above. A minority tradition, attested by writers like Irenaeus and Tertullian, reads it in the singular, referring to Christ’s own birth. Both readings agree that a divine birth is being described; but the plural reading — the one that dominates the manuscript tradition — makes the connection to the indwelling explicit. Those who receive the Word are, already in verse 13, born of God. Verse 14 simply names the consequence: God, dwelling in those born of him, and they, at last, seeing his glory.

Reading the Prologue as one movement

Put together, the sequence of the Prologue reads not as a set of isolated doctrinal statements but as a single unfolding drama:

The Word was with God, and was God, before anything was made (1:1–3). The Word was the true light coming into the world (1:9). He came to his own, and was rejected by many (1:10–11). But to those who received him, he gave the power to become children of God — born not of blood or flesh or human will, but of God himself (1:12–13). And the Word, already received into human hearts, pitched his tent in them — became flesh in them — and they saw his glory: not a glory of visible splendor, but the hidden glory of the Suffering Servant, the glory that will be fully unveiled on the Cross and fully received in the ongoing indwelling Jesus promises in chapters 14 through 16.

This is not a rejection of the Fathers, who were right that Jesus is truly God and truly man. It is, I think, a recovery of something the Prologue itself is trying to say beneath and beyond that necessary doctrine: that the goal of the Incarnation was never simply that God should become man, but that God should be able, at last, to dwell in man — in each of us — and that only there, in that dwelling, is his glory finally seen. “We will come to him,” Jesus says in John 14:23, “and make our home with him.” That is the sentence the Prologue has been preparing us to hear since its very first verses. That is the tent John means. And we — not a mountain, not a moment thirty-three years in Galilee, but we — are the ones in whom he asks, still, to dwell.

For greater details, read: Is John 1:14 About the Incarnation?

Important Reading

From the School of Mary

– Theology and Spiritual Life (Video) (Text)

– Dogma and Spiritual Life: How Truth Transforms the Soul

– The Deposit of Faith and the Hermeneutical Necessity of Spiritual Theology, On Receiving, Assimilating, and Transmitting Divine Revelation

– Lectio Divina & Theology (Handout and video)

– On The Method in Theology

– Word of God and Prophecy

– The Central Method of Integral Theology: Lectio Divina. (Video)

– Rethinking Theological Method and Theology

– From the “Thinking Reed” to the Unconscious Self