Summary: This article explores the persistent gap between theology and spiritual life, tracing it from the Fathers of the Church to the great theologians of the twentieth century. It argues that while modern theologians possessed profound faith and insight, they never articulated a method of spiritual theology capable of uniting intellectual understanding with transformative union with God. Drawing on the witness of the Fathers and the guidance of the magisterium, the article highlights the urgent need for a theology that is both rigorous and formative—one in which study, contemplation, and spiritual growth are integrated into a coherent path toward divine communion.
Jean: What I find difficult to understand is that the great theologians of the last century—de Lubac, Congar, Daniélou, Chenu, Rahner, Balthasar—all clearly perceived the fundamental importance of the spiritual life, as well as the profound disconnection that had arisen between theology and spiritual life. What is striking is that, at some point, they did not succeed in building a structure capable of reuniting theology with spiritual theology, or more concretely with lived spiritual life. To do so would have required the development of a genuine spiritual theology, indeed its refounding from top to bottom, and this did not happen. Thus, as brilliant as they undoubtedly were, they either could not see—or could not manage, or both—how to remedy a problem that they nonetheless diagnosed with remarkable clarity. This is genuinely surprising. They rediscovered the Fathers of the Church and clearly recognised that they were at once spiritual masters and theologians; yet the analytical tools at their disposal did not allow them to take the decisive step further. De Lubac’s focus on the spiritual senses of Scripture is certainly a step forward, but it remains a radically insufficient one, because it does not cross over to the other side, that is, into the domain of spiritual theology itself and its necessary development. In this sense, he remains a theologian of a certain kind, but he does not become a spiritual theologian, despite all his efforts.
For context and scholarly grounding, see Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale. Les quatre sens de l’Écriture, 4 vols., Paris: Aubier, 1959–1964; Yves Congar, La foi et la théologie, Paris: Cerf, 1962; Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theology and Sanctity, in Explorations in Theology I, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989. These works illustrate both the acute awareness of the problem and the limits of the solutions proposed.
Theologian: What you are identifying is a real historical and methodological impasse, and it has been recognised—often implicitly—by a number of the figures you mention, even if it was never resolved in a structural way.
The ressourcement theologians of the twentieth century clearly diagnosed the problem with great acuity. De Lubac’s critique of a purely extrinsicist theology, Congar’s concern for a lived ecclesiology, Daniélou’s insistence on the history of salvation, Chenu’s attention to experience and history, Rahner’s emphasis on the existential dimension of grace, and Balthasar’s attempt to reunite dogmatics and holiness all testify to a shared intuition: theology had become detached from the concrete process of transformation in Christ. This diagnosis is not in doubt and is extensively documented in their own writings. For instance, de Lubac explicitly laments a theology that has become “a science among others” rather than wisdom ordered to life with God (Henri de Lubac, Theology in History, Ignatius Press, 1996).
However, the difficulty lay not in seeing the problem, but in the tools available to address it. These theologians remained, by formation and institutional location, primarily dogmatic theologians operating within the academic framework of the modern faculty of theology. Even when they turned to the Fathers, they approached them largely through historical, textual, and doctrinal lenses. The patristic synthesis they admired—where theology, exegesis, asceticism, and contemplation formed a single act of wisdom—presupposed a unified habitus that no longer existed in modern theological education. As Jean Daniélou himself admitted, the Fathers were theologians because they were saints, but modern theology no longer knew how to form saints as theologians (The Bible and the Liturgy, University of Notre Dame Press, 2008).
De Lubac’s work on the spiritual senses of Scripture is emblematic of this limitation. It is indeed a decisive step, because it shows that Scripture is ordered to transformation and participation in the mystery of Christ, not merely to conceptual knowledge. Yet, as you rightly observe, it stops short of crossing into a fully developed theology of the spiritual life. The spiritual senses are analysed historically and theologically, but they are not integrated into a systematic account of the stages of growth, discernment, purification, and union. In this sense, de Lubac remains a theologian reflecting on spirituality rather than a theologian of spiritual life (Exégèse médiévale, Aubier, 1959–1964; English synthesis in Medieval Exegesis, Eerdmans, 1998).
The same limitation can be seen in Balthasar. His insistence that “the saints are the true interpreters of Scripture” and that theology must be kneeling theology is profound and prophetic (Theology and Sanctity, Ignatius Press, 1986). Yet even Balthasar does not construct a discipline of spiritual theology with its own epistemology, criteria of verification, and pedagogical structure. His work gestures toward holiness as the form of theology, but it does not articulate how theological knowledge and lived transformation are organically unified across the whole process of spiritual growth.
What was missing, therefore, was not goodwill or insight, but a methodological refoundation. A genuine theology of spiritual life would have required a rethinking of theological knowledge itself: not only what is known, but how it is known, by whom, and through what kind of transformation of the subject. This kind of epistemological shift was already present, in a different register, in the great spiritual theologians—John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, Francis de Sales—but their insights were marginalised as “mystical” rather than integrated into the core of theology. Bernard McGinn has shown how this marginalisation occurred historically, as spirituality was gradually detached from theology after the medieval period (The Presence of God, vol. 1, Crossroad, 1991).
In short, the twentieth-century masters saw the wound clearly, rediscovered the sources in which the wound did not exist, and even pointed toward the remedy. But they remained constrained by an academic and conceptual framework that prevented them from rebuilding theology as a science of transformation ordered to union with God. What you are describing is not a failure of intelligence, but the limits of a theological culture that could not yet imagine a fully reconstituted spiritual theology as a central and structuring discipline.
Jean: Let us take another example. Several major theologians—and even philosophers, I am thinking in particular of Maritain—attempted to explore the question of contemplation. We know, and we remember, the great debate that took place in the 1930s and 1940s, a debate that in fact never truly reached a resolution, because the contemplation of the mysteries of God was confused with contemplation as understood by Saint John of the Cross. It was assumed that the two were identical. This brings me back to my central point. What is striking is that contemplation was extensively discussed. Daniélou’s major work on contemplation and mysticism in Saint Gregory of Nyssa is, in itself, an impressive achievement: a serious scholarly investigation into one of the finest representatives of spiritual theology, alongside Origen—whom de Lubac, for his part, undertook to rehabilitate. Yet what is surprising is that, although we are presented with stages of contemplation, with an ascent—as in Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses, as analysed by Daniélou—we never arrive at a genuine integration of the two realities, namely spiritual life and theology. In other words, this contemplation, as studied by Daniélou in Gregory of Nyssa, does not truly advance; it does not become a bridge between these two domains, and certainly not a pedagogy capable of serving our own time. This is what is most disconcerting. The Fathers of the Church are unearthed, brought back into view, presented and offered to us—and this is remarkable—but the very heart of their secret, one might say, is neither developed nor explicated. In a paradoxical way, we remain dependent on theology as it was conceived in the Middle Ages. Thus, on the one hand, the proponents of the nouvelle théologie proclaim loudly and clearly that theology cannot, and should not, continue along neo-scholastic lines; they position themselves against the neo-Thomist system. Yet, in reality, they remain indebted to what St. Thomas himself bequeathed. As a result, they never succeed in transforming theology into something that truly reunifies spiritual life, spiritual theology, and the intellectual quest for understanding faith.
For scholarly orientation, see Jean Daniélou, Platonisme et théologie mystique. Essai sur la doctrine spirituelle de saint Grégoire de Nysse, Paris: Aubier, 1944; Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson, New York: Paulist Press, 1978; Jacques Maritain, Degrees of Knowledge, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995. These works illustrate both the depth of the retrieval of the patristic tradition and the unresolved difficulty of integrating contemplation into a renewed, unified theological framework.
Theologian: Your analysis touches a second, very revealing fault line, and here again the paradox you identify is real and well documented in the history of twentieth-century theology.
The debate on contemplation in the 1930s–40s is a good entry point because it exposes, almost experimentally, the limits of the theological framework that even the nouvelle théologie did not succeed in transcending. The controversy surrounding “infused contemplation” shows that very different realities were being conflated: on the one hand, a theological or sapiential contemplation of the mysteries of faith (contemplatio Veritatis, or contemplatio Rerum divinarum), accessible through faith enlightened by charity; on the other hand, the contemplative transformation described by John of the Cross, which occurs in the spirit and transcends any perception in the mind and involves a radical purification of the faculties. The fact that these were treated as essentially the same reality reveals a lack of a differentiated theology of spiritual growth. For a clear historical account of this confusion, see Louis Bouyer, Introduction to Spirituality, which already notes how modern theology lacked the conceptual tools to articulate stages of spiritual life without collapsing them into intellectual categories (Desclée, 1963; English ed. University of Notre Dame Press, 1968).
Jacques Maritain is particularly instructive here. His distinction between “connatural knowledge” and speculative knowledge, and his attempt to articulate contemplation as a form of experiential wisdom rooted in charity, was a genuine effort to bridge theology and spiritual life. Yet Maritain remains fundamentally within a Thomistic epistemological framework. Contemplation, for him, is still analysed primarily as a mode of knowledge, only implicitly understood as a process of transformation of the whole person through successive divine initiatives. His approach clarifies certain aspects but does not yield a pedagogy of spiritual growth. This limitation is evident in Degrees of Knowledge (University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), where contemplation is elevated but not structurally integrated into a theology of the spiritual journey.
Your example of Daniélou’s work on Gregory of Nyssa is even more telling. Daniélou’s Platonisme et théologie mystique is a masterful historical and theological study, and his reading of The Life of Moses clearly identifies an itinerary: purification, illumination, entry into the divine darkness, and endless progress into God. No one can deny the brilliance or depth of this analysis. Yet, as you note, this itinerary remains largely descriptive and retrospective. It does not become operative; it does not function as a bridge between dogmatic theology and lived spiritual formation. Gregory’s ascent is presented as an object of scholarly contemplation, not as a normative or transposable path for contemporary believers. Daniélou himself was aware of this tension, insisting that he was doing historical theology, not spiritual direction. See Jean Daniélou, Platonism and Mystical Theology: The Doctrine of Spiritual Perfection in St. Gregory of Nyssa (Wipf & Stock, 2005).
This is where the heart of the paradox lies. The Fathers are retrieved, admired, and carefully interpreted, but the inner logic of their unity—where theology, exegesis, ascetic practice, and contemplation form a single movement toward union with God—is not reconstructed as a living theological discipline. Bernard McGinn has shown that, from the late Middle Ages onwards, mysticism was progressively detached from theology and reclassified as an exceptional or marginal phenomenon. Modern patristic scholarship retrieves the texts but not the epistemological unity that sustained them (The Foundations of Mysticism, Crossroad, 1991).
Your observation that twentieth-century theology remains, in a deep sense, tributary to the medieval synthesis is therefore accurate. Even when theologians explicitly reject neo-scholasticism, they often retain its basic architecture: theology as a speculative science ordered primarily to conceptual coherence. Thomas Aquinas himself cannot be blamed for this, since his own theology was profoundly integrated with prayer and contemplation. But what was received and systematised in later centuries was a reduced Thomism, one that separated speculative theology from the lived ascent toward God. As a result, even those who opposed neo-Thomism lacked a genuinely alternative structure capable of reuniting dogma, spiritual theology, and the transformation of the subject.
In short, the rediscovery of the Fathers was real, and the intuition that theology must be reunited with spiritual life was sound. What was missing was the courage—or perhaps the conceptual freedom—to refound theology itself as a wisdom ordered to transformation, with spiritual theology not as a marginal field, but as a structuring centre. Until that refoundation occurs, contemplation will continue to be studied, described, and admired, but not fully integrated as the living heart where theology and spiritual life become one.
Jean: As you can see, the definition of theology remained unchanged, and they accepted it as fides quaerens intellectum—faith seeking understanding. Yet, they could have drawn from their study of the Fathers of the Church to assert that theology itself is a guide to union with God. Such a perspective would have gone a long way toward bridging the abyss between the intellectual effort to understand divine realities—as theology was still conceived in their time—and an understanding of theology as a practical guide toward God – fides quaerens unionem. In this approach, the exercise of the mind is not merely about grasping who God is, but about showing the path to reach Him.
Theologian: Exactly. What you are highlighting is a crucial distinction that modern theology rarely made explicit. The great theologians of the twentieth century inherited the definition of theology as fides quaerens intellectum, a formulation rooted in Augustine, Anslem and Aquinas. This emphasises that theology is an intellectual pursuit: faith motivates the mind to understand divine truths. Yet, it remains largely cognitive, directed toward understanding rather than transformation.
Had these theologians taken more seriously the witness of the Fathers, they could have articulated theology not only as a quest for knowledge but as an orienting path toward union with God—fides quaerens unionem. The Fathers consistently integrated knowledge, prayer, moral formation, and contemplation. For them, theology was inseparable from spiritual ascent. Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil, and John of Damascus all treat understanding as a ladder: the intellect discerns, but the life of the soul ascends toward God. In this framework, grasping a doctrine or insight is never an end in itself; it is always an instrument for deeper communion.
Framing theology this way would have bridged the persistent gap between intellectual effort and interior transformation. Instead of producing knowledge that exists in parallel with spiritual life, theology could actively guide the believer—student, priest, or religious—toward God. Each act of reasoning would then be both cognitive and formative: a step in an ascent shaped by grace, informed by Scripture, and rooted in prayer. In other words, theology becomes not merely understanding, but a lived path—fides quaerens unionem. This perspective, if methodically articulated, would have reconciled centuries of doctrinal insight with the practical exigencies of spiritual formation, something the twentieth-century renewal glimpsed but never fully systematised.
Jean: The Fathers of the Church and the early masters clearly affirmed that theology meant being united with God—the ultimate stage of spiritual growth—and, in this light, meant: contemplating the Father. This is precisely why only St. John the Evangelist could rightly be called ‘the theologian.’ How is it, then, that the study of the Fathers did not bring this insight to the fore, nor inspire a radical rethinking of what theology truly is?
Theologian: You have touched on a paradox that has puzzled many scholars of modern theology. The Fathers of the Church consistently understood theology as inseparable from union with God. For them, the pursuit of divine knowledge was never purely intellectual; it was fundamentally existential and transformative. Gregory of Nazianzus asserts that one must first be purified and illuminated before speaking of God (Oration 27, 3), and Augustine repeatedly stresses that the highest knowledge is participation in God rather than mere conceptual comprehension. Likewise, the mystical theology of the Cappadocians, John of Damascus, and later the medieval masters, makes clear that contemplation of God’s essence—especially of the Father—is the culmination of theological pursuit. This is why St. John the Evangelist alone, whose Gospel and Epistles exhibit theology as lived experience, rightly bears the title “the Theologian.” Theology, for him, is not first a discipline of the mind but a path of intimate union, nourished by the Spirit, accessible only through love and fidelity.
Yet the study of the Fathers by twentieth-century theologians did not lead to a full rethinking of theology’s essence. There are several reasons for this. First, their reception of the Fathers was often filtered through the intellectual and methodological constraints of their own time—whether the neo-scholastic framework or the historical-critical methods of the nouvelle théologie. These frameworks emphasised doctrinal precision, historical accuracy, or philosophical coherence, but they were not designed to make the union of the soul with God a central methodological principle. Second, the implicit spiritual insight of the Fathers—how theology is simultaneously intellectual and transformative—was often read as exemplary content rather than as a model for the method of theology itself. In other words, the Fathers were mined for doctrines, exegetical insights, or historical precedence, but not for their implicit methodology of union with God. Third, twentieth-century theologians tended to separate theological reflection from lived spiritual formation. Faith and life were assumed to coexist in the theologian, but the active integration of contemplative ascent into theology as a method was rarely articulated.
In short, the Fathers’ vision remained implicit, a “hidden method” embedded in their lives and texts. Modern scholars, even while recovering them with extraordinary historical and doctrinal rigor, lacked a framework for translating that vision into a systematic theology in which union with God—contemplative, transformative, participatory—would be recognised as the defining telos of theological inquiry. The result is that the Church today still inherits the paradox: we can study theology with immense erudition and historical insight, but the bridge to the transformative union celebrated by the Fathers remains largely unbuilt.
Jean: And worst of all, instead of recognising the relevance of an author who is admittedly mysterious—Dionysius the Areopagite, or the Pseudo-Dionysius—rather than engaging seriously with the substance of what he says, what has largely been done is to criticise the influence of Greek philosophy upon him. On the one hand, the author is diminished: he is no longer seen as belonging to the apostolic age, despite having long been regarded as a disciple of St. Paul. On the other hand, he is attacked as a mere product of the philosophical climate of his time. In the end, the genuine relevance of what he actually says is never received. Yet what he offers is of profound significance; it is an authentically Christian work that he carries out, and this is largely ignored. What is even more perplexing is that in the time of St. Thomas Aquinas—who is, in fact, the only Christian author Thomas comments upon in a sustained way, since he does not comment on Augustine but rather on Aristotle and Dionysius—Dionysius is treated as an authority of almost apostolic standing through St. Paul. And yet, even though Thomas comments on Dionysius and accords him such weight, he does not offer a path of unification. On the contrary, theology, developing from Thomas’s time onwards—of course not only from Thomas himself—takes a form that will eventually separate spiritual life from the intellectual effort of theology, understood in the strictly academic sense in which we use the term today.
And so this is, in the end, what was done in the last century. The question was not even approached from the standpoint of spiritual theology; no spiritual theology was developed that could respond to what was already clearly perceived. All, all, all the major authors of the twentieth century are in agreement on this point: there is an abyss between spiritual life on the one hand and theology on the other. But what concrete proposal was made? Apart from a few fragments in Balthasar, a few fragments in de Lubac, they all remain prisoners of a particular way of doing theology and never truly break free from it. They revolt against, or react strongly to, neo-scholasticism, but at the same time they remain, more or less, captive to the vision of theology and the method that ultimately arose from the scientific effort of St. Thomas Aquinas. That is the paradox.
For authoritative context, see Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem, New York: Paulist Press, 1987; Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Divine Names, trans. C. M. Schroeder, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2014; Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theology and Sanctity, in Explorations in Theology I, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989; Henri de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, New York: Herder & Herder, 1967. These works illustrate both the depth of the twentieth-century diagnosis and the unresolved failure to articulate a genuinely unifying spiritual theology.
Theologian: What you are pointing to here is perhaps the most decisive and, at the same time, the most tragic paradox of modern theology. With Pseudo-Dionysius the problem becomes almost brutally clear, because his reception exposes, more than any other case, the incapacity of twentieth-century theology to think from within spiritual transformation itself.
The modern treatment of Dionysius is revealing. Once his apostolic authorship was dismissed, historical criticism largely reduced him to a late antique synthesis of Christianity and Neoplatonism. From that moment on, the dominant question became one of influence: how much Proclus, how much Plotinus, how much “Greek metaphysics” contaminates his theology. This approach is well documented in twentieth-century scholarship, from Koch and Stiglmayr at the beginning of the century to much later work that continued to frame Dionysius primarily as a philosophical problem rather than as a spiritual theologian. Andrew Louth has shown very clearly how this reductionist reading eclipsed the inner coherence of Dionysius’ Christian project, which is not philosophical speculation but an account of deification through ecclesial, liturgical, and ascetical mediation (Denys the Areopagite, Continuum, 2002).
What is lost in this process is precisely the heart of Dionysius’ contribution: the articulation of theology as a movement of transformation, where hierarchy, liturgy, purification, illumination, and union are inseparable. His negative theology is not a theory about the limits of language; it is the culmination of a spiritual itinerary in which the intellect is progressively stripped so that the person may be united to God beyond concepts. Vladimir Lossky insisted forcefully that Dionysius is unintelligible outside this experiential horizon and that his theology is “existential” in the strongest patristic sense (The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, SVS Press, 1997).
Your observation concerning Thomas Aquinas is particularly important and often misunderstood. It is historically true that Dionysius is the only Christian author Aquinas comments on extensively, and that he cites him more than any other patristic authority except Augustine. Aquinas clearly sees Dionysius as a decisive theological witness, and he integrates many Dionysian themes into his own synthesis, especially hierarchy, participation, and the primacy of divine causality. Yet Aquinas does not allow Dionysius to restructure the form of theology itself. Theology, for Aquinas, becomes a scientia ordered to the intelligibility of revealed truth, even though it presupposes faith and is ultimately ordered to beatitude. Jean-Pierre Torrell notes that, while Aquinas personally lived a deeply contemplative life, the scientific architecture of his theology made possible a later separation between speculative theology and spiritual life (Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Person and His Work, CUA Press, 2005).
This is the decisive point. The problem is not Aquinas himself, but what his method made possible once detached from his personal holiness. Dionysius’ theology cannot survive such a detachment, because it presupposes that theological knowledge emerges from purification and union. When theology becomes primarily an intellectual discipline, Dionysius can only be read as a philosopher, a Platonist, or a historical curiosity. His true relevance—namely, that theology is inseparable from ascent, from liturgical participation, and from inner transformation—becomes inaccessible.
The twentieth-century theologians you mention were acutely aware of the rupture. They all say it, in one form or another. De Lubac speaks of the loss of theology as wisdom; Congar laments the divorce between theology and sanctity; Daniélou insists that the Fathers were theologians because they were spiritual men; Balthasar repeats endlessly that holiness is the criterion of theological truth. Yet, as you rightly insist, none of them succeeded in constructing a theology that would structurally reunify spiritual life, spiritual theology, and dogmatic intelligence. Even Balthasar, for all his brilliance, remains largely at the level of prophetic intuition rather than methodological reconstruction (The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1, Ignatius Press, 1982).
Pseudo-Dionysius exposes the failure precisely because he offers what modern theology lacks: a theological vision in which doctrine, liturgy, ecclesial mediation, and mystical ascent are one single reality. That vision was admired, commented upon, and mined for concepts, but never allowed to reshape theology from within. Instead, modern theology remained captive—often unconsciously—of a post-medieval model in which theology is primarily an academic science, and spiritual life an application or supplement.
In that sense, your conclusion is difficult to contest. The twentieth century diagnosed the abyss with remarkable unanimity, but it did not build a bridge. The refusal—or inability—to think from within spiritual transformation itself meant that even the most luminous witnesses, including Dionysius, could not be fully received. Until theology dares to be reconstituted as a wisdom ordered to deification, rather than as a science about revealed data, the gap will remain, no matter how often it is denounced.
Jean: In the end, the method commonly called the ‘scientific method,’ which was adopted with great force towards the end of the nineteenth century and especially during the twentieth, being based primarily on historical facts, remains, in a sense, at the surface of the texts. It forgets that a genuinely theological method must operate within—or alongside—this historical method in order to perceive more fully the reality before us. Scholars could observe historical facts: the existence of a spiritual life, the existence of theological reflection. Yet the scientific method, on its own, has no means of building a bridge between the two, precisely because this task belongs to a theological approach. Relying solely on the so-called scientific method—which is indeed necessary—is simply not sufficient to construct, one might say, a true theological method. To use the historico-critical method, the scientific approach, the careful work on texts, solely within theology, is a reduction of theology itself, a forgetting that theology has, is, and ought to have its own method. This, I would argue, is the tragic element of everything that has occurred from the end of the nineteenth century, indeed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the fundamental flaw in our approach was not perceived.
What we urgently need, then, is a theological method that, of course, makes proper use of the scientific method—but does so in a way that illuminates the elements intrinsic to the theological enterprise itself. A simple example is the handling of sacred Scripture, the Bible. There are at least two, and in reality three, levels to consider. First, there is the level of the text itself, where the scientific method applies. But if one confines oneself to exegesis—that is, to the work of the text alone—in order to extract meaning, this is entirely insufficient; today, all scholars agree on this point. This creates the necessity for what is called biblical theology. Biblical theology must have its own method: it must know how it works and what it seeks. And it must operate under a light higher than that of reason, for the light of reason governs the scientific method, whereas the light of faith governs the theological method. What we urgently need, then, is the articulation of a theological method—a task that has not yet been accomplished. Moreover, we also require the articulation of a method of spiritual theology, which today scarcely exists at all, or exists only in the vaguest form.
For reference, see Henri de Lubac, Exegèse médiévale. Les quatre sens de l’Écriture, 4 vols., Paris: Aubier, 1959–1964; Raymond E. Brown, The Critical Meaning of the Bible, New York: Paulist Press, 1981; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q.1, a.1, for the distinction between the light of reason and the light of faith. These works illustrate the necessity of integrating scientific and theological methods while pointing to the current lacuna in the development of spiritual theology.
Theologian: What you are describing is, in effect, a category mistake that became structural in modern theology. The historical-critical or so-called scientific method is indispensable, but it is intrinsically limited by its own epistemological horizon. It works on texts as historical artefacts and can only ever establish what is accessible to reason operating within history. As such, it remains, as you say very precisely, “au ras des textes”. This diagnosis is not controversial today; it is explicitly acknowledged in magisterial, theological, and exegetical literature.
The decisive point is that theology cannot be reduced to the application of a scientific method to religious data without ceasing to be theology. The Second Vatican Council already made this clear when it affirmed that Scripture must be interpreted “in the same Spirit in which it was written” (Dei Verbum §12). This statement is methodological, not devotional. It recognises that there is a level of intelligibility that does not arise from historical analysis alone, but from faith itself as a participatory light. Joseph Ratzinger repeatedly insisted that historical criticism is necessary but not sufficient, and that when it becomes self-sufficient it produces a “positivist reduction” of theology (Biblical Interpretation in Crisis, Eerdmans, 1989).
Your example of biblical theology is particularly well chosen. Modern exegesis gradually realised that the accumulation of exegetical results does not spontaneously yield theological meaning. Hence the emergence, in the mid-twentieth century, of biblical theology as a distinct discipline. Yet even here the problem reappears. Biblical theology often remains methodologically unclear: is it a synthesis of exegetical results, a history of ideas, or a theological reading under the rule of faith? Brevard Childs argued forcefully that without an explicitly theological norm, biblical theology collapses either into history of religions or into literary analysis (Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, Fortress Press, 1993).
What you are identifying goes one step further. Even when a theological level is acknowledged beyond exegesis, the method governing that level is rarely articulated. Theological reasoning is often practised, but not thematised. Classical theology knew very well that theology has its own principles: faith as its habitus, revelation as its object, and union with God as its ultimate end. Thomas Aquinas states this explicitly when he defines theology as a scientia subalternata, governed by the light of divine knowledge rather than by natural reason alone (Summa Theologiae I, q.1, a.2). The tragedy, as you suggest, is that modern theology retained the language of science while forgetting the nature of the light under which theology operates.
This becomes even more acute when we turn to spiritual theology. Here the insufficiency of the scientific method is absolute. The realities at stake—purification, illumination, union, transformation of the faculties, reception of infused grace, fullness of love, participation into the redemptive mission of the Lord—are not accessible to historical method except as external descriptions. Without a theological method grounded in participation, discernment, and experiential verification within faith, spiritual life can only be described, not understood from within. This is why figures such as John of the Cross were progressively marginalised as “mystics”, while their writings were stripped of their theological status. Bernard McGinn documents this shift with great precision, showing how mysticism ceased to be considered a theological locus (The Presence of God, vol. 1, Crossroad, 1991).
What is striking is that twentieth-century theology largely recognised the symptoms but not the methodological cause. The gap between theology and spiritual life was observed, lamented, even denounced, but the underlying confusion of methods was rarely addressed head-on. Historical criticism continued to function as the default norm of rigour, while theology’s own mode of knowing—rooted in faith as a transformative light—remained underdeveloped or implicit. Étienne Gilson already warned that when theology imitates the methods of the natural sciences, it loses its proper object and its proper wisdom (The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, University of Notre Dame Press, 1991).
Your conclusion follows with a certain inevitability. What is needed is not the rejection of the scientific method, but its reintegration into a higher theological method. That theological method must be explicit about its principles, its criteria of truth, and its end. And beyond that, spiritual theology requires its own articulated method, one capable of accounting for growth, discernment, and transformation in Christ. Until such methods are made explicit and operative, theology will continue to oscillate between historical exactitude and spiritual impotence, fully aware of the abyss, yet unable to cross it.
Jean: As for spiritual theology, it has been caught in a double vice, successively. The first was the debate surrounding the question of contemplation and the errors that accompanied that debate. That debate eventually ran out of steam, and we saw the shift from neo-scholasticism to the nouvelle théologie. Yet once again, spiritual theology found itself trapped in a vice that prevented it from achieving proper development, because the method of the nouvelle théologie was essentially based on the scientific, historical method and on the development of doctrine. Without a method of its own, however, no substantive results could emerge. From the perspective of spiritual theology, this meant that a sufficiently mature reflection on theology itself could not take place. There were neither enough authors, nor sufficient depth, nor appropriate methods to address what one might call the ‘illness’ of theology: all these great thinkers recognised the abyss that exists between spiritual life and theology as it had developed and as it is conceived—whether in neo-scholasticism or later in the nouvelle théologie, in other words, theology as we know it today.
In my view, the fundamental problem is that spiritual theology has been held hostage by two reductive systems. Each has its merits, but each is very inadequate when taken in isolation; what is needed is a method that is true to the object of spiritual theology itself, one with real breadth, depth, and scope. There have certainly been developments in the field of spiritual anthropology—for example, Jean Mouroux’s work on the spirit in Saint John of the Cross—but even these are insufficient, for they are not integrated into a synthesis or a method proper to spiritual theology and appropriate to its very object.”
For reference, see Jean Mouroux, L’Esprit selon saint Jean de la Croix, Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1954; Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale, vols. 1–4, Paris: Aubier, 1959–1964; Yves Congar, La foi et la théologie, Paris: Cerf, 1962. These works illustrate both the attempts to deepen the study of spiritual life and the lack of a method sufficient to unite spiritual theology with systematic theological reflection.
Theologian: Your diagnosis is coherent, historically grounded, and theologically difficult to refute. Spiritual theology has indeed been caught in a double vice, which has prevented it from achieving true methodological maturity and from exercising a critical reflection on theology itself.
The first vice was the debate on the question of contemplation, particularly between the 1920s and 1950s. This debate, as it was conducted, trapped spiritual theology within a false alternative. On the one hand, contemplation was intellectualised as a simple deepening of the mysteries of faith, accessible to all as the ordinary summit of Christian life. On the other hand, contemplation in the strict sense of St. John of the Cross was understood as a purifying and transformative action of God, linked to a precise, demanding, and profoundly Pascalian path. The problem was not merely that these two realities were confused, but that no sufficiently robust spiritual method existed to distinguish, articulate, and situate them within a dynamic of growth. When the debate ran its course, no structuring synthesis emerged. This is evident even in lucid authors such as Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, and later in Louis Bouyer, who himself acknowledges the failure to produce a fully integrated vision (see Introduction to Spirituality, University of Notre Dame Press, 1968).
The second vice was the transition to the nouvelle théologie. This movement undeniably freed theology from certain constraints of neo-scholasticism, but it did so while privileging almost exclusively historical, patristic, and doctrinal tools. While necessary, these tools do not constitute a complete theological method, and still less a method of spiritual theology. The nouvelle théologie thought about the development of dogma, the rediscovery of sources, and the historical dimension of faith, but it did not consider the transformation of the believing subject as a structuring theological locus. Henri de Lubac himself recognises that theology had lost its dimension as wisdom ordered to spiritual life, without proposing a method to restore it (Theology in History, Ignatius Press, 1996).
Here your observation is decisive. In the absence of a sufficiently developed spiritual theology, theology itself could not be interrogated from within about its own illness. Twentieth-century authors saw the abyss between spiritual life and theology, but they lacked a theological interlocutor* adequate to the problem. Spiritual theology, weakened methodologically, was unable to tell dogmatic theology: ‘Your way of knowing is no longer proportionate to your object.’ It remained descriptive, exhortative, or marginal.
You are correct to note that certain developments did occur, particularly in spiritual anthropology. Jean Mouroux is a significant example. His work on the Christian experience and the spirit in Saint John of the Cross is remarkably subtle and profound (L’expérience chrétienne, Aubier, 1952). Yet, as you observe, this reflection remains partial. It illuminates the spiritual person, but it is not embedded within a global synthesis articulating theological knowledge, spiritual discernment, and growth toward union with God. Mouroux himself does not claim to refound spiritual theology as a structured discipline.
The underlying problem is thus methodological rather than merely thematic. Spiritual theology has its own object: the transformation of the person by grace toward union with God. Such an object requires a method capable of integrating experience, discernment, doctrinal tradition, and the light of faith as a cognitive principle. Neither neo-scholasticism, with its speculative reduction, nor the nouvelle théologie, with its predominance of historical-critical methods, were capable of providing this method. Bernard McGinn demonstrates very clearly how the marginalisation of mysticism as a theological locus deprived Western theology of one of its internal principles of renewal (The Presence of God, vol. 1, Crossroad, 1991).
Your conclusion is therefore rigorously warranted. Spiritual theology did not fail due to a lack of spiritual richness or witnesses, but because it was taken hostage by two successive, reductive systems—each valuable in its own way, yet incapable in isolation of accounting for its proper object. Until an authentically spiritual theological method is articulated—that is, a method that grounds knowledge in transformation in Christ— theology will continue to diagnose its malaise without ever achieving its cure.
Jean: Today, we are confronted with a very acute awareness of the necessity of spiritual life, yet we do not see the path by which this life should be realised. This awareness is evident in the magisterium of Pope Benedict XVI and of Pope Francis. It is very clear: the necessity of spiritual life is insisted upon by both. When Pope Benedict speaks to seminarians, he does so explicitly. He strives with all his energy to promote lectio divina, yet even in this domain, because, from the standpoint of spiritual theology, we do not possess a clear method—there is no supernatural anthropology of lectio divina—progress is limited. We do not arrive at a concrete response. There remains an abyss between spiritual life and theology, and spiritual theology is still insufficiently developed to create the bridge between these two realities.
Theolgian
What you are describing corresponds very closely to the present ecclesial situation, and it can be documented with precision from the contemporary magisterium. There is indeed today a very acute awareness of the necessity of spiritual life, but a striking inability to articulate the path by which this life becomes concrete, stable, formative, and transmissible. The problem is no longer one of intention or exhortation, but of mediation and method.
Both Benedict XVI and Pope Francis insist repeatedly on the primacy of the spiritual life. Benedict XVI, in particular, was remarkably lucid on this point. In his addresses to seminarians, he consistently underlined that theology without prayer becomes sterile, and that priestly formation collapses if it is not rooted in an interior life nourished by Scripture. His promotion of lectio divina was not marginal or devotional, but structural. In Verbum Domini, he states explicitly that lectio divina “brings about that dialogue between God and man” by which the Word becomes formative of life, not merely informative of the intellect (Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini, §86, Vatican, 2010).
Yet, as you rightly note, even here we encounter the same impasse. Lectio divina is promoted, encouraged, even insisted upon, but without a sufficiently articulated theological and spiritual method capable of explaining how the Word acts, how the person is transformed, how the faculties are progressively reconfigured, and how this practice integrates into a coherent itinerary of growth. What is missing is precisely what you name: a supernatural anthropology of lectio divina. Without such an anthropology, the practice risks remaining either moralistic (“read and pray more”) or psychological (“it helps me feel closer to God”), without becoming a true locus of theological intelligence and spiritual transformation.
Pope Francis, in a different register, confirms the same diagnosis. His insistence on discernment, on accompaniment, on interior freedom, and on the primacy of grace presupposes a living spiritual life. In Evangelii Gaudium, he explicitly warns against a theology disconnected from lived experience and from prayer, speaking of a “theoretical Christianity” that fails to touch real life (§231). Yet here again, the exhortation is strong, the intuition is clear, but the methodological mediation is largely absent. Discernment is urged, but rarely grounded in a developed theology of spiritual growth capable of forming discerners (Evangelii Gaudium, Vatican, 2013).
This brings us to the heart of your point. The abyss between theology and spiritual life persists, not because the Church does not value spiritual life, but because spiritual theology has not yet been sufficiently developed to function as a true bridge. It lacks a clear method, a clear epistemology, and a clear articulation of its object. As a result, theology continues to operate largely at the level of concepts, texts, and doctrines, while spiritual life is encouraged at the level of exhortation and practice, without a robust theological framework capable of unifying the two.
This situation has been analysed with remarkable clarity by Joseph Ratzinger himself. He notes that modern theology often knows what it must say about prayer and spiritual life, but not how to integrate these realities into the act of theological knowing itself. When theology ceases to be wisdom shaped by participation in the mystery, it inevitably produces a gap between doctrine and life (Introduction to Christianity, new ed., Ignatius Press, 2004).
In short, we are today in a paradoxical situation. The necessity of spiritual life is universally acknowledged at the highest level of the Church’s teaching. Practices such as lectio divina are officially promoted. Discernment and interiority are constantly invoked. And yet, the absence of a mature, methodologically explicit spiritual theology prevents these elements from converging into a coherent path of formation. Until such a theology is articulated — one capable of thinking knowledge from within transformation, and Scripture from within lived communion — the Church will continue to experience this painful disjunction between what it knows must be lived and what it knows how to teach.
Jean: It is clear that the current stage, and indeed the stages to come, urgently calls us to establish a method of spiritual theology—to develop spiritual theology in such a way that it can integrate theological effort with the reality of all the insights gained through research over past centuries, reconcile them, and build a bridge to personal life: the spiritual life of the theologian, the theology student, the priest, the religious, or the monk.
Theologian: What you are expressing here corresponds to a genuine kairos for theology, and it is increasingly recognised, albeit often implicitly, across different ecclesial contexts. The urgency is no longer primarily pastoral or devotional; it is methodological and theological. Without an explicit, articulated method of spiritual theology, the immense fruits of biblical, patristic, doctrinal, and historical research accumulated over the last two centuries remain largely unintegrated at the level where theology should ultimately bear fruit: the transformation of the person in Christ.
At its core, what is required is the recognition that spiritual theology is not a secondary or applied discipline, but a structuring locus of theological intelligence. Its object is not simply “spiritual practices” or “religious experience”, but the progressive configuration of the human person to Christ through grace, culminating in union with God. Such an object cannot be adequately approached either by speculative theology alone or by historical methods alone. It demands a theological method governed by the light of faith as lived and interiorly assimilated. Thomas Aquinas himself affirms that theology is ordered to beatitude and proceeds under the light of divine knowledge, not merely human reason (Summa Theologiae I, q.1, a.6), yet this principle was never methodologically unfolded in relation to spiritual growth.
The task, therefore, is one of integration rather than replacement. A genuine method of spiritual theology would have to receive, without reduction, the results of historical-critical research, patristic ressourcement, doctrinal development, and philosophical clarification. But it would also have to situate them within a higher unity, one in which knowledge is intrinsically ordered to transformation. Jean Daniélou already insisted that theology becomes sterile when it ceases to be a wisdom that shapes life, even if it gains in technical precision (Theology and the Mysteries of Salvation, SCM Press, 1964). The challenge today is to give this intuition a concrete methodological form.
Such a method would necessarily include the personal spiritual life of the theologian, the student, the priest, the religious, or the monk, not as an optional accompaniment, but as an intrinsic dimension of theological knowing. This is not a romantic or pietistic claim; it is epistemological. The Fathers of the Church assumed without hesitation that theological insight grows in proportion to purification, prayer, and participation in the mystery celebrated in the liturgy. Gregory of Nazianzus’ well-known assertion that one must first be purified before speaking of God is not an ascetical aside, but a methodological principle (Oration 27, 3; English trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, vol. 7).
Recent magisterial teaching confirms this direction, even if it does not yet provide the method you are calling for. Benedict XVI repeatedly affirmed that theology must be practised “on one’s knees”, and that Scripture can only be truly understood within a life of prayer (Verbum Domini, §87). Pope Francis, in his own language, insists that discernment, accompaniment, and spiritual experience are indispensable for any authentic formation, warning against a purely abstract theology disconnected from life (Evangelii Gaudium, §231). These statements point clearly towards the necessity of a bridge, but they presuppose a spiritual theology capable of sustaining it.
What is now required is a disciplined, patient, and rigorous development of spiritual theology as a fully theological discipline: one with its own object, principles, criteria of truth, and pedagogy. Bernard McGinn has shown that, historically, mysticism and spiritual life were once central to theology and only later marginalised (The Presence of God, vol. 1, Crossroad, 1991). The task before us is not innovation in the sense of novelty, but retrieval at a deeper level: retrieving not only texts and doctrines, but the very way in which theology once unified understanding and transformation.
In this sense, your conclusion is compelling. Without a mature spiritual theology, theology remains divided within itself. With it, the fruits of centuries of research could finally be reconciled with the lived journey of faith, allowing theology once again to function as wisdom leading to communion with God, rather than as a body of knowledge running parallel to spiritual life.
Jean: As a conclusion we can say that the great theologians of last century unconsciously used their solid faith as a kind of method, but this was never made explicit. When a great theologian like them reads a text, their faith—along with the perception it cultivates—guides them toward the relevant passages and the essential ideas. It is from this discernment that they produce monographs or historical studies. Their implicit use of the light of a strong faith, rooted in a firm Christian formation and a deep personal spiritual life, never became articulated as a method. In a sense, we were left orphans. They relied both on the ‘scientific method’ and on this implicit, intuitive sense born of their pure, strong faith, yet they never conceived of developing a method of spiritual theology. They remained tributaries of the prevailing intellectual framework of theology as it had been shaped since the Middle Ages. The Fathers of the Church possessed a profound faith and a vivid spiritual perception of divine realities (Contemplatio rerum divinarum). Yet, like our modern great theologians, when these Fathers were read, their hidden method was never fully explored. The scientific-historical method was retained openly, while a potentially powerful method—at least the possibility of one—remained largely hidden, unarticulated, and unrealised.
Theologian: Exactly. Your conclusion captures the paradox with remarkable clarity. The great theologians of the twentieth century—de Lubac, Congar, Rahner, Balthasar, Daniélou, and others—operated with an extraordinary combination: a rigorous intellectual framework shaped by the prevailing theological methods, and an intuitive, almost silent guidance of the Spirit, rooted in their personal faith and interior life. This internal compass allowed them to discern the heart of texts, the essential contours of doctrine, and the living dynamics of tradition. It shaped their judgments, their analyses, their reconstructions of patristic thought, and their historical syntheses.
Yet, precisely because this guiding principle was never formalised or theorised, it remained invisible to others. It functioned almost like a hidden algorithm: highly effective in practice, but inaccessible as a replicable method. The result is that modern theology inherited an enormous richness—historical insight, doctrinal recovery, patristic retrieval—but lacked the explicit bridge that could have connected intellectual understanding with spiritual formation. Students, theologians, and clergy were left to navigate this wealth without a systematic methodology for integrating faith, intellect, and interior life.
The analogy with the Fathers of the Church is particularly telling. Their writings are suffused with spiritual insight, but that insight is inseparable from their lived union with God. The hidden “method” of the Fathers—how they integrated contemplation, moral formation, theological insight, and liturgical life—was never extracted as a systematic principle for others to follow. When twentieth-century scholarship applied the historical-critical method, it retained what could be seen, documented, and measured, while the more subtle, formative method remained in the shadows.
So we see the double inheritance: on one hand, extraordinary theological and historical productivity guided by faith; on the other, a structural absence—the absence of a consciously articulated method of spiritual theology capable of uniting life, doctrine, and insight. In this sense, both the Fathers and the modern theologians are examples of what could be called “method in action,” but not “method as method.” The challenge now is to make explicit what they operated on implicitly, so that the unity of theology and spiritual life can finally be realised and transmitted.
Conclusion
The history of theology over the past century reveals a striking paradox. Great theologians—de Lubac, Congar, Balthasar, Daniélou, Rahner, Chenu, and Ratzinger—demonstrated extraordinary insight and faith, yet their work never fully bridged the gulf between intellectual understanding and the transformative life of union with God. While they implicitly relied on the guidance of faith and personal spiritual formation, this hidden method was never articulated or systematised. The study of the Fathers of the Church confirms that theology is inseparable from the ascent of the soul toward God, yet twentieth-century scholarship largely treated their insights as historical or doctrinal content, rather than as a methodological model. As a result, modern theology remains largely fides quaerens intellectum—faith seeking understanding—but has yet to be developed fully as fides quaerens unionem: faith seeking union with God. Today, there is a pressing need to construct a spiritual theology with its own method, one that integrates intellectual effort, historical and doctrinal research, and the lived spiritual life of the theologian or student. Only through such an approach can theology regain its fullness, functioning both as knowledge and as a formative path toward communion with God.
* A theological interlocutor is a discipline, with its own object, method, and authority, capable of entering into a real dialogue with theology as it is practised (dogmatic, biblical, systematic theology) and of questioning it from within theology itself. In this case, that interlocutor should have been spiritual theology understood as a mature theological science.
Twentieth-century theologians clearly diagnosed the problem: they saw the growing separation between spiritual life and theology, between lived faith and intellectual elaboration. What they did not have, however, was a theologically constituted voice able to say to theology: “Your way of knowing is no longer proportionate to your object.” Without such a voice, theology could lament its malaise, but not be corrected or reoriented in a principled way.
A merely descriptive spirituality, an exhortative pastoral discourse, or even a rich phenomenology of religious experience cannot function as a theological interlocutor. These approaches can accompany theology, but they cannot judge it theologically. To do that, one needs a discipline that knows what it is talking about, that has clarified its method, and that can claim its place within theology itself. Spiritual theology, precisely because its object is the transformation of the subject in Christ and union with God, would have been uniquely positioned to play this role—but it never reached sufficient methodological maturity to do so.
As a result, dogmatic and systematic theology continued to develop according to inherited intellectual models, while spiritual life was treated as something adjacent, secondary, or merely practical. There was no interlocutor capable of forcing theology to rethink its own epistemology in the light of its ultimate end, which is union with God. That is what I meant by the absence of a theological interlocutor adequate to the problem.
Read also
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– The Central Method of Integral Theology: Lectio Divina. (Video)
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