Towards a Recovered Theology of Spiritual Formation
Jean Khoury
Abstract: This article argues that the history of Christian theology discloses a structural divergence between two fundamentally different modes of knowing: wisdom (sapientia), which is participative, infused, and ordered to union with God, and knowledge (scientia), which is analytical, constructed, and ordered to the intellectual mastery of revealed truth. Beginning with the grammar of medieval academic grades and their counterparts in monastic spiritual growth, the article traces the historical moment at which these two epistemologies begin to coexist without integration, focusing on the pivotal case of Thomas Aquinas. A central contention is that Aquinas’s celebrated definition of wisdom — sapientia est quae ordinat, wisdom is that which orders — represents a decisive reduction: it relocates wisdom within the cognitive framework of scientia, as its highest degree, rather than recognising it as a categorically different mode of knowing, one in which it is God who shows and orders, not the human mind. The biblical, Augustinian, and Carmelite traditions preserve a richer and more exact account, in which wisdom is the soul’s participation in God’s own perspective, received rather than achieved, inseparable from contemplative union. The article traces the consequences of this reduction for subsequent Christian formation and concludes by proposing the recovery of wisdom in this fuller, participative sense as the formal principle of a renewed theology of spiritual formation.
Introduction
Among the most consequential, and least examined, structural decisions in the history of Christian theology is the shift that occurred in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when theology migrated from the monastery to the university. This migration was not experienced as rupture at the time; it was presented, sincerely and largely correctly, as an enrichment. Yet the two institutions operated according to different internal logics, pursued different ends, and produced different kinds of human beings. The monastery formed the monk in wisdom — a wisdom understood not as intellectual achievement but as participation in God’s own way of seeing reality. The university formed the scholar in knowledge — a rigorous, ordered, publicly transmissible account of what is to be believed and why.
The distinction between wisdom and knowledge is not a modern invention, nor is it a polemical device. It is embedded in the tradition at its deepest levels. Saint Paul, writing to the Corinthians, does not hesitate to name Christ himself as the wisdom of God: Christus Dei virtus et Dei sapientia — “Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:24). This wisdom is not an intellectual system. It is a person. To receive it is not to achieve a higher degree of understanding; it is to be drawn into a relationship, a union, a participation in the divine life. Augustine, who provides the most rigorous classical analysis of the distinction, contrasts scientia — the rational knowledge of temporal realities — with sapientia — the contemplative participation in eternal Truth, which is God himself (De Trinitate XII–XIV). Sapientia, for Augustine, is not the apex of the intellect’s ascent; it is a different mode of the soul’s orientation altogether, one in which God illumines from within rather than the mind constructs from without.
This article takes that distinction seriously and traces what happens when it is progressively blurred. The argument proceeds in four stages. The first section examines the grammar of medieval academic grades and their monastic counterparts, showing that the word ‘beginner’ operates in two fundamentally different semantic fields. The second section analyses the case of Thomas Aquinas, whose definition of wisdom — however admirable in its context — tends to reduce sapientia to the highest ordering principle of the intellect, leaving behind the participative depth that the tradition had always preserved (we will hear and objection and discuss it in a note). The third section traces the historical consequences of this reduction for Christian self-understanding and for spiritual formation. The fourth and final section argues for the recovery of wisdom in its full, participative, Augustinian and biblical sense as the formal principle of a renewed theology of spiritual formation: a theology whose subject is not how the faith is understood, but how the person is drawn by grace into God’s own seeing.
I. Two Grammars of Formation: Academic Grades and Monastic Stages
1.1 The Medieval University and Its Grades
The vocabulary of academic formation in the medieval university derives not from the Church’s monastic tradition but from the institutional life of the emerging studia generalia, above all the University of Paris. The term magister regens — the ‘regent master’ — designates a holder of the highest degree in a faculty who is actively exercising his teaching office: lecturing, presiding over disputations, directing students. The distinction between the magister regens and the magister non regens, well attested in university statutes, captures a purely functional reality: the difference between one who holds an office and one who exercises it.
The broader sequence of degrees followed a recognisable progression: bachelor (baccalaureus), licentiate (licentiatus), and master or doctor (magister, doctor). Each stage was formally conferred, publicly examined, and institutionally recognised. Authority was granted, not discerned. One advanced not by being seen to be transformed, but by demonstrating competence in a defined body of knowledge. Jean-Pierre Torrell, in his biography of Aquinas, notes that Aquinas was twice magister regens in theology at Paris, holding the Dominican chair and actively teaching there during two distinct periods. This is a statement about institutional function, not about spiritual state.
1.2 The Monastic Tradition and Its Stages of Growth
The monastery operates according to an entirely different grammar. Its constitutive text, the Rule of St. Benedict, begins with the declaration that the monastic life is a ‘school of the Lord’s service’ (Dominici schola servitii, RB Prol. 45). What is learned in this school is not a body of propositions; it is conversion. The criterion of progress is not intellectual mastery but growth in humility and charity. Benedict’s ladder of humility (Scala humilitatis, RB 7) is not a curriculum; it is a description of what happens to a soul progressively yielded to God.
St. John Cassian provides the most systematic articulation of this monastic pedagogy in the Western tradition. He locates the immediate goal of the monk not in understanding but in purity of heart: scopos vero, id est destinatio, cordis puritas — ‘our immediate goal is purity of heart’ (Conferences 1.4). The end is the Kingdom of God; the path is the progressive purification of the heart’s affections and desires. This is an existential programme, not an intellectual one. The stages it generates — the novice, defined by Benedict’s question si revera Deum quaerit, ‘if he truly seeks God’ (RB 58); the beginner (incipiens) struggling in the purgative way; the proficient (proficiens) in whom the Word begins to dwell; the spiritual elder (abba) recognised for his discernment; and finally the ‘perfect’ in charity — are stages of interior transformation, not of intellectual achievement.
The spiritual elder, the abba, deserves particular attention. In the Apophthegmata Patrum, authority of this kind is never conferred; it is simply recognised. No institution appoints an abba; a community discovers one. The defining quality is discernment — discretio, which Cassian names ‘the mother of the virtues’ (Conferences 2.2) — and behind discernment lies something more fundamental: the capacity to see as God sees. The abba does not organise reality by superior intelligence; he perceives it from within a union with God that has progressively purified his vision. His words carry weight not because he has mastered a subject but because God speaks through him.
1.3 The Equivocation on ‘Beginner’
The contrast between the two grammars becomes acutely visible when we attend to a single word. When Thomas Aquinas opens the Summa Theologiae, he explains his purpose in the Prologue: ‘We have considered that beginners in this science have been much hindered…’ The Latin is precise: incipientes in hac doctrina. The beginner here is defined pedagogically — one who is commencing the study of sacred doctrine as an intellectual discipline. Aquinas writes that he wishes to present what belongs to sacred doctrine secundum ordinem disciplinae, ‘according to the order of a discipline.’
The contrast with Cassian’s incipiens could not be sharper. In the monastic usage, the beginner is one who has just entered a school of existential transformation; his ‘beginning’ is measured in terms of the conversion of his heart and the purification of his desires. In Aquinas’s usage, the beginner is a student who lacks a clear and ordered presentation of the subject matter. The word is the same; the referent is entirely different. This is not a failure on Aquinas’s part; it reflects the legitimate differentiation of two kinds of formation. But it becomes structurally dangerous when the distinction is forgotten — when later readers assume that progress in the scholastic sense automatically corresponds to progress in the monastic sense.
Table 1: Structural Divergence Between Wisdom and Knowledge as Modes of Formation
| Criterion | Spiritual Formation (Wisdom) | University Theology (Knowledge) |
| Subject | The monk in conversion | The student in formation |
| Finality | Union with God; seeing as God sees | Ordered knowledge of divine truth |
| Epistemology | Participative: wisdom received from God | Scientific: knowledge constructed by the mind |
| Mode of knowing | Infused, contemplative, love-illumined | Analytical, demonstrative, disputative |
| Criterion of progress | Growth in charity and purity of heart | Clarity, coherence, mastery of questions |
| Authority | Experiential and recognised (the abba) | Institutional and conferred (the magister) |
| Grade structure | Novice, beginner, proficient, spiritual elder, the perfect | Bachelor, licentiate, master, doctor |
| Criterion of ‘mastery’ | Holiness recognised by community; fruits in others | Examination, degree, institutional conferral |
| Primary source | Scripture, Fathers, contemplative experience | Revelation as intellectually ordered system |
II. Thomas Aquinas and the Reduction of Wisdom
2.1 Sapientia as Ordering Intelligence
Thomas Aquinas is one of the supreme intellectual achievements of Christian civilisation, and nothing in this article is intended to diminish that achievement. But a specific and consequential apparent reduction operates in his treatment of wisdom, and it must be named precisely.
When Aquinas defines wisdom, he draws on the Aristotelian tradition: sapientia est quae ordinat — wisdom is that which orders (cf. ST II-II, q.45). The wise man is the one who can see things in their proper hierarchy, who can situate every partial truth within the larger whole, who can judge all things by reference to the highest principles. This is a genuine and important insight. But it remains, fundamentally, a cognitive achievement. It describes wisdom as the apex of the intellect’s natural capacity, elevated by grace to a supernatural level. What it does not seem to describe is wisdom as a categorically different mode of knowing — one in which the initiative belongs to God, not to the human mind.
The limitation becomes visible when Aquinas’s definition is compared with Augustine’s far more radical analysis. In the De Trinitate (XII–XIV), Augustine draws a sharp distinction between scientia — the rational, discursive knowledge of temporal realities, ordered by reason — and sapientia — the contemplative participation in eternal Truth, which is God himself. For Augustine, the transition from scientia to sapientia is not a transition to a higher intellectual register; it is a transition to a different mode of the soul’s orientation altogether. Sapientia does not arise when the mind organises more successfully; it arises when the mind is turned, by grace and love, towards the eternal Light and begins to see by that Light rather than by its own power. The soul does not construct wisdom; it receives it. God illumines; the soul sees.
This Augustinian distinction corresponds to what the biblical tradition consistently affirms. In the Wisdom literature, wisdom is not primarily a human achievement but a divine gift, a participation in God’s own creative perspective. Proverbs 8 presents Wisdom as a divine person present at creation, delighting before God. In the New Testament, Paul identifies wisdom not with a system of thought but with a person: Christum Dei virtutem et Dei sapientiam — ‘Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God’ (1 Cor 1:24). To possess wisdom, in Paul’s sense, is not to have understood the faith more completely; it is to be in Christ, to have the mind of Christ (1 Cor 2:16). This is participative, not cognitive. It is union, not organisation.
Objection and Response
One might object that it is inadequate to reduce St. Thomas Aquinas’ understanding and experience of wisdom merely to the act of “ordering things.” After all, natural wisdom, as in Aristotelian terms, involves intellectual order—seeing causes rightly and understanding how all things relate to their ultimate end (ST I-II, q. 45, a. 1)—but Aquinas’ theological work clearly operates on a deeper, supernatural level. Some could argue that his wisdom, especially in theology, is not simply discursive reasoning; it is a participatory vision of divine truth, a gift that moves the intellect and will beyond mere human order (ST II-II, q. 45, a. 3, ad 2). This raises questions about the nature of his theological activity: was Aquinas using only the general light of faith, or was he already under the influence of the gift of wisdom? And how should we understand the extraordinary vision he received on 6th December 1273, after which he reportedly said that all he had written seemed like straw? Does this imply a higher level of wisdom, distinct from what he exercised in ordinary theological work?
The answer lies in Aquinas’ nuanced distinctions. While natural wisdom indeed orders knowledge rationally toward God, and prudence orders human acts toward the good (ST I-II, q. 47, a. 1), his theological work operates under the supernatural gift of wisdom, which moves beyond discursive reasoning. This gift enables the intellect to perceive divine realities connaturally—to see and savour them as God sees them (ST II-II, q. 45, a. 3, ad 2). Theology, for Aquinas, is not merely the correct ordering of knowledge or argument; it is a participatory vision in which philosophy structures reasoning, prudence orders human action, and the gift of wisdom illuminates the intellect so that divine truths are apprehended and relished at the level of the soul. In this way, Aquinas’ theological work reflects both human preparation and the active participation of divine wisdom.
The extraordinary vision of 6th December 1273 represents a distinct and superior mode of this same gift. Unlike ordinary theological work, which is structured, discursive, and communicable, the vision was immediate, contemplative, and transformative: Aquinas’ intellect participated directly in the divine order, apprehending truths by connaturality in a manner beyond expression or reasoning. His cessation of writing was not due to lack of preparation or duty; it was because the ordinary mode of theological articulation was eclipsed by direct divine reception, which surpassed what human reasoning and structured exposition could accomplish.
St. John of the Cross illustrates a further dimension: he does not seek to understand wisdom in order to explain it, nor to systematise it for teaching. He knows that the experience is ineffable (it falls essentially in the spirit, not in the conscious soul), beyond human expression (cf. Subida al Monte Carmelo, I, cap. 5; Noche Oscura, Libro II, cap. 23). His purpose is not to communicate his understanding but to lead others into direct contact with this wisdom. The difference is decisive: it reveals at least two modalities of wisdom. One operates with a human modality (which falls in the conscious soul, which is closer to the gift of Knowledge, “connatural” with the conscious mind), in which preparation, study, and discursive reasoning allow the intellect to participate connaturally in divine truth; this is what Aquinas exercised in his theology. The other is by its nature ineffable and cannot be communicated, only received through direct encounter and contemplative participation, as described by John of the Cross.
This distinction changes the perspective of one who experiences wisdom: am I supposed to share what I have contemplated, or am I supposed to lead others into contemplation? Aquinas’ theological work exemplifies the first: the human intellect, elevated by the gift of wisdom (with human modality), can communicate connatural knowledge. John of the Cross exemplifies the second: the aim is to guide souls toward direct experience of divine wisdom, not to say something about it.
In conclusion, one cannot reduce Aquinas’ understanding and experience of wisdom to “putting things in order.” His theological work employs supernatural wisdom, seeing things by connaturality as God sees them (ST II-II, q. 45, a. 3, ad 2), while his final vision demonstrates this gift in its most intense, contemplative, and transformative form. Complementing this, St. John of the Cross shows that wisdom can also be received in a modality that is ineffable and cannot be shared directly, only entered into contemplatively (Noche Oscura, Libro II, cap. 23). There is therefore both continuity and progression: natural and prudential order support the intellect (ST I-II, q. 45, a. 1; q. 47, a. 1), infused wisdom elevates theological reasoning (ST II-II, q. 45, a. 3), and extraordinary contemplative wisdom reveals the full participation of the soul in God’s own seeing, beyond what can be communicated in words.
2.2 What the Carmelites Recover
The Carmelite tradition, and John of the Cross in particular, preserves and deepens our understanding of how we can participate to this wisdom with a rigour that is fully systematic, even if its categories are experiential rather than philosophical. For John of the Cross, sabiduría — wisdom — is precisely what the soul receives when its own intellectual activity ceases. It is infused, not acquired. It comes in the darkness of contemplation, when the soul can no longer produce by its own effort, and God begins to act directly on the will and the intellect. The Dark Night is not a failure of knowledge; it is the purification of the knowing subject so that God’s own light can illuminate without distortion.
This is the exact inverse of the scholastic model. In the university, the goal is to increase the clarity and comprehensiveness of the mind’s grasp of revealed truth. In the Carmelite ascent, the goal is to decrease the mind’s autonomous activity during prayer until it becomes transparent to God’s own seeing. John writes that in the highest states of contemplative union, the soul knows God not by understanding about God, but by a simple, loving, obscure gaze that is itself a participation in the divine knowing (contemplation falls in the spirit not in the soul/mind). The epistemological structure is radically different: not the mind ascending to God, but God descending into the spirit and transforming it from within, the mind being quietened.
Note: St John of the Cross is not opposed to study—whether of the sciences or of theology—but his purpose is entirely different. He seeks to lead the soul into direct experience of divine wisdom, rather than to contradict or reject intellectual learning (he himself studied theology at Salamanca). His implicit point is that wisdom is to be received, not framed as an object of study, but encountered in a loving relationship with God, through prayer. Its natural milieu is the life of love, contemplative prayer, and union. He often describes wisdom as a “noticia amorosa” (loving knowledge) and recommends silence (of the mind) and recollection in faith to receive it. Wisdom is truly communicated to the spirit (the tip of the soul), beyond ordinary perception or conscious awareness. Scholastic theology, which he studied and deeply honoured, belongs to a different order and if falls in the conscious mind (the soul): in the prologue to the Spiritual Canticle, he writes,“although Your Reverence may lack the exercise of scholastic theology, by which the divine truths are understood/grasped, you do not lack that of mystical [theology], which is known through love, wherein they are not only known but simultaneously savoured”(St. John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, Prologue, 3).
Teresa of Ávila arrives at the same conclusion from the experiential side. Her mapping of the soul’s journey through the seven mansions of the Interior Castle is not a taxonomy of intellectual states; it is a description of progressive union. The final mansions are characterised not by greater understanding but by greater transformation — what she calls spiritual marriage, in which the soul lives from God’s own life. Here, wisdom is not something the soul has; it is something the soul participates in, because it has been drawn into the One who is Wisdom. She underscores that contemplative prayer—where God’s wisdom / contemplation is received—is not chiefly about acquiring new lights/truths/thoughts regarding faith, but about cultivating love for God (Way of Perfection, ch. 26).
2.3 The Map and the Path
This analysis clarifies a distinction. The Summa Theologiae gives the reader a map: a rigorous, ordered, comprehensive account of what God is, what creation is, what grace and virtue are, what Christ accomplishes, what the sacraments do. The map is not the path. It can orient the traveller; it cannot substitute for the journey. And crucially, the map is drawn by a mind that organises — even when that mind is elevated by grace and charity. The path, by contrast, is walked in a mode of receptivity, in which God shows the way rather than the traveller deducing it.
Aquinas is well aware that union with God is the end of the Christian life. He affirms that the contemplative life is superior to the active (ST II-II, q.182, a.1), that charity is friendship with God — caritas est amicitia quaedam hominis ad Deum (ST II-II, q.23, a.1) — and that sacred doctrine is ordered to God as its end (ST I, q.1, a.7). The ordo perfectionis remains fully present in the Summa at the level of content. But the formal entry point is the ordo disciplinae, the order of teaching, not the ordo vitae, the order of lived conversion. The Summa can therefore be received, taught, and examined as an intellectual achievement entirely independently of any spiritual transformation in the one who receives it. It is useful and. needed. The monastic tradition would have found this structural possibility not merely surprising but dangerous. Gregory the Great’s warning retains its edge: cum vita desit, nihil est quod lingua doceat — ‘when life is lacking, there is nothing for the tongue to teach’ (Regula Pastoralis I, 2).
What is absent from the Summa is what may be called an operative pedagogy of wisdom: a structured, discerning, progressive account of how God acts on the soul, how the soul is drawn out of its self-organising activity into God’s own light, how wisdom is received rather than constructed. This is not because Aquinas denies any of this; it is because the Summa is not written in that genre. The operative pedagogy is found elsewhere: in Cassian, in Benedict, in the Rhineland mystics, in Teresa, in John of the Cross. It is these writers who provide what one might call a theology of received wisdom — a rigorous account of how the person is changed, and illumined, by grace.
III. The Historical Consequences: Formation Without Wisdom
3.1 The Marginalisation of Participative Knowing
The university did not destroy the monastery. It was not designed to. But the emergence of a powerful, self-sustaining, institutionally fertile model of theology — one that could train preachers, produce doctrinal clarity, engage philosophical culture, and attract the most gifted minds of the age — created conditions in which the sapiential–participative model was progressively marginalised. Jean Leclercq, in The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, captures the essential character of monastic theology: ‘Monastic theology is oriented towards the life of union with God; it is a theology of experience… rather than a speculative science.’ Its centre is not the quaestio but the lectio; its criterion is not logical rigour but transformation. As the quaestio displaced the lectio and contemplatio as the dominant form of theological work, the mode of knowing that required the transformation of the subject was progressively supplanted by the mode that did not.
The consequences are subtle but far-reaching. Once theology is stabilised as a scientia — as a body of knowledge transmissible independently of the spiritual state of the one who transmits it — wisdom in the participative sense becomes a private matter, a devotional supplement, rather than a formal dimension of theological formation itself. The great mystical currents of the medieval and early modern periods — Bernard of Clairvaux, the Victorines, the Rhineland mystics, the Spanish Carmelites — maintained and deepened the tradition of participative knowing. But they became streams rather than a main river. Spiritual theology was increasingly treated as a sub-discipline, an application of dogmatic and moral theology, rather than as the primary and irreducible articulation of what it means to know God.
3.2 Fides Quaerens Intellectum and Its Limits
The paradigm of fides quaerens intellectum — faith seeking understanding — is not in itself deficient. It names something genuine and necessary: the drive of the believing mind to understand what it believes, to render it intelligible, to defend it against error. Without this drive, theology cannot fulfil its apologetic and catechetical functions. The achievement of the medieval doctors, and of Aquinas above all, is not to be deprecated.
But when fides quaerens intellectum becomes the exclusive paradigm of theological formation, a functional separation occurs. Theology is taught as a body of knowledge; spiritual life is proposed as a set of practices or exhortations; and the intrinsic connection between the two — the dynamic by which knowledge of God, properly received, becomes transformative — is no longer formalised as a rigorous object of study. The result is a formation that explains the faith without necessarily initiating into the life of faith as lived participation in God.
The implicit model of Christian life generated by an exclusively intellectual theology is one in which the goal of formation is understanding: understanding the Creed, the sacraments, the moral law. These are genuine goals. But they are not the summit. The summit, in every strand of the Christian tradition, is union with God in charity. And union, as the tradition consistently affirms, is not the fruit of understanding more clearly; it is the fruit of being more completely received into God’s own life. Gregory the Great formulated the classical principle: vera perfectio est caritas — ‘true perfection is charity’ (Homilies on the Gospels 30). Charity is not an intellectual achievement; it is a participation in the love that God is.
3.3 The Gap Between Catechesis and Spiritual Formation
The practical consequence of this historical displacement is visible in the present. The Church possesses an extraordinarily rich theological tradition — doctrinal, moral, apologetic, liturgical. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, promulgated by John Paul II in 1992, represents a monumental achievement in the ordering and transmission of that tradition for adult formation. But what is comparatively underdeveloped — what has never received the kind of sustained, institutionally supported, formally rigorous treatment that systematic theology has received — is the theology of spiritual formation: a structured, transmissible account of how the person is drawn by grace into God’s own wisdom, with its stages, its criteria, its operative pedagogy, and its integration with doctrinal truth.
The elements are not absent from the tradition; they are abundantly present, from Cassian through the Carmelites. What is lacking is synthesis and institutional form: a framework in which the intellectual clarity of the doctrinal tradition and the experiential precision of the participative–sapiential tradition are brought together in a single, ordered whole, with wisdom — in the full Augustinian and biblical sense — as the governing principle.
Pope John Paul II identified this gap with characteristic lucidity in Novo Millennio Ineunte. Reflecting on the Universal Call to Holiness of Lumen Gentium, he wrote that ‘the time has come to re-propose wholeheartedly to everyone this high standard of ordinary Christian living,’ insisting that ‘the paths to holiness are personal and call for a genuine training in holiness, adapted to people’s needs’ (NMI, 31). The phrase ‘training in holiness’ points precisely to what is missing: not more catechesis, which the Church already provides, but a structured pedagogy of transformation — a formation ordered not only to understanding the faith but to being drawn into the life of God.
IV. Towards a Theology of Spiritual Formation: Wisdom as Participation
4.1 Recovering Wisdom in Its Full Sense
The recovery that is needed is not merely terminological. It requires a formal reorientation of what is meant by wisdom in theological formation, away from the Thomistic definition — wisdom as the highest ordering intelligence — and towards the Augustinian and biblical definition (and even the Dionysian’s one): wisdom as the soul’s participation in God’s own perspective, received through grace and contemplative union, inseparable from charity.
Augustine’s analysis in the De Trinitate remains the most rigorous classical resource for this recovery. He distinguishes scientia — the discursive, rational knowledge of temporal realities, necessary and honourable but subordinate — from sapientia — the contemplative participation in the eternal Truth that is God himself. The transition between them is not a matter of ascending to a higher intellectual register; it is a matter of the soul’s fundamental orientation being turned, by grace and love, from its own constructions towards the light of God. In sapientia, the soul does not organise God; God illumines the soul. The initiative is entirely on the side of God. The soul’s role is receptivity, availability, the purified openness that the monastic tradition calls purity of heart.
This is what Cassian means when he says that the end of the monk is the Kingdom of God and the immediate goal is purity of heart (Conferences 1.4). Purity of heart is not a moral achievement in the ordinary sense; it is the progressive removal of everything that distorts the soul’s capacity to receive God’s light. The monk does not thereby become wiser in the sense of organising reality better; he becomes more transparent to the One who is Wisdom, so that God can show him what needs to be shown. This is the epistemological structure of wisdom in the participative sense: God shows, and the soul sees.
Job’s wisdom, as the book presents it, is paradigmatic. Job arrives at wisdom not through argument — his arguments are no less sophisticated than those of his friends, and in some respects more so — but through a rupture: the divine speech from the whirlwind (Job 38–41), in which God does not answer Job’s questions but shows him the incomprehensible vastness of the created order. Job’s response is not intellectual satisfaction; it is a new kind of seeing, born from having been addressed by God directly. ‘I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee’ (Job 42:5). This is wisdom: not understanding about God, but encounter with God that transforms the one who encounters.
4.2 The Criteria of the Spiritual Guide
Teresa of Ávila provides, in a characteristically practical way, a set of criteria for the authentic spiritual guide that reflects this understanding of wisdom. In the Life and the Interior Castle, she identifies three qualities whose convergence is both necessary and rare: spiritual experience (what one has actually lived under grace), spiritual knowledge (not general theology, but specifically a theology ordered to the interior life — what she calls ‘learning’ and what we may properly call spiritual theology), and discernment (the capacity to judge rightly the movements of God and of the soul, distinguishing genuine grace from illusion, from disordered affectivity, from spiritual pride).
What is remarkable about this convergence is that it cannot be institutionally conferred. Cassian had already identified the foundational epistemological principle: nullus sibi hoc arroget — ‘let no one attribute this to himself’ (Conferences 2). The decisive qualities of the genuine spiritual guide are precisely those that resist self-certification and institutional conferral. They can only be recognised — empirically, ecclesially, over time — by the fruits they bear in the lives of those whom the guide has accompanied. The Apophthegmata Patrum knows no other mechanism: the authority of the abba is attested by those who came, were helped, and were changed.
John of the Cross is severe about the consequences of the wrong combination. In the Living Flame of Love, he observes that some directors ‘neither understand themselves nor others’ because they lack the proper synthesis of doctrinal knowledge and spiritual experience. The imbalance is not merely regrettable; it is dangerous for the souls entrusted to such guides. Doctrinal knowledge without spiritual experience produces a guide who can explain the map but has never walked the path. Spiritual experience without doctrinal grounding produces a guide who has walked but cannot orient others reliably. The genuine spiritual master holds both — but the integrating principle is not intelligence; it is wisdom received from God, which gives the guide the capacity to see each soul as God sees it.
4.3 A Theology Ordered to Reception
What is ultimately required is a formal shift in the conception of theological formation itself: not the abandonment of fides quaerens intellectum, but its completion by what might be called fides quaerens unionem — faith seeking union — or more exactly, a theology whose formal principle is not construction but reception. The subject of such a theology is not the mind that organises divine truth, but the person who is progressively drawn by grace into God’s own knowing and loving.
Such a theology would be rigorously structured, because the tradition that sustains it is not less rigorous than the scholastic tradition; it is rigorous about different things. Its stages — purification, illumination, union — are sufficiently consistent across Cassian, Benedict, Gregory, the Victorines, Teresa, and John of the Cross to admit of systematic treatment. Its criteria — purity of heart, growth in charity, fruit in others, discernment of spirits — are precise and testable, even if their testing requires a different kind of attention than examination. And its governing question, at every stage of formation, would be the one that the Gospel imposes: not ‘have you understood?’, but ‘have you been changed?’
The Gospel itself provides the formal principle most clearly. The fourth evangelist states his purpose without ambiguity: ‘these things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name’ (Jn 20:31). The Gospel is not a doctrinal compendium. It is an initiation. It leads the reader not merely to knowledge about Jesus but into encounter with Jesus — into what John calls life, and what the tradition calls union. A theology of spiritual formation would take this Johannine dynamism as its governing principle and would ask, at every stage: does this lead to encounter, to conversion, to deeper charity, to participation in the divine life?
The programme of Novo Millennio Ineunte points in this direction. When John Paul II insists that ‘all pastoral initiatives must be set in relation to holiness’ (NMI, 30), he is not adding a devotional clause to a pastoral strategy. He is recovering the ancient principle that formation is ordered to transformation, and transformation to union. To respond adequately to this recovery, the Church needs not only clearer catechesis but a richer and more rigorous spiritual theology — one whose formal principle is wisdom in the full sense: not the intelligence that orders, but the participation that sees.
Conclusion
The divergence between wisdom and knowledge as modes of theological formation is not a dispute between two traditions about which is more important. Both are necessary. What the university tradition provides — doctrinal clarity, philosophical rigour, the capacity to transmit the faith intelligibly across cultures and centuries — is indispensable. What the sapiential tradition provides — a structured pedagogy of transformation, a grammar of interior growth, a theology of participative union — is equally indispensable, and far more neglected.
The reduction of wisdom to its cognitive-organisational dimension, latent in Aquinas’s definition and increasingly dominant in subsequent theology, has had consequences that extend far beyond academic theology. It has shaped, largely invisibly, the entire horizon of Christian formation: what it is for, what it looks like, how it is measured. When wisdom is understood as the highest ordering intelligence, formation is understood as the production of that intelligence. When wisdom is understood as participation in God’s own perspective, formation is understood as the gradual transformation of the person until they can receive what only God can give.
The tradition has never entirely lost the second understanding. It is preserved in the Augustinian distinction between scientia and sapientia, in the Carmelite theology of infused contemplation, in the patristic recognition of the abba as one through whom God speaks, in the Johannine declaration that eternal life is to know the Father and the Son (Jn 17:3) — not to know about them, but to know them, in the intimate, participative sense that the Greek ginosko and the Hebrew yada carry. It is preserved, above all, in the simple Benedictine criterion: si revera Deum quaerit — if he truly seeks God.
What is required now is not a new synthesis to replace the scholastic one, but a recovery of the integrating principle that the scholastic development, at its best, never intended to displace. That principle is wisdom: received, not constructed; infused, not achieved; ordered to union, not to organisation. It is, in the end, what the tradition means when it says that the beginning and the end of the Christian life are the same: to seek the face of God, and to be found by it.
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Bibliography
Primary Sources
Augustine of Hippo. De Trinitate. Trans. Edmund Hill. Brooklyn: New City Press, 1991. [Books XII–XIV are directly relevant to the sapientia–scientia distinction.]
Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1920–1942. [Cited as ST by part, question, and article.]
Aquinas, Thomas. Prologue to the Summa Theologiae. In Opera Omnia. Rome: Leonine Commission, 1882–.
Benedict of Nursia. Regula Monachorum. Ed. Timothy Fry. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1981. [Cited as RB by chapter and verse.]
Cassian, John. Conferences (Collationes). Trans. Boniface Ramsey. New York: Paulist Press, 1997. [Cited by conference and chapter.]
Cassian, John. Institutes (De Institutis Coenobiorum). Trans. Boniface Ramsey. New York: Newman Press, 2000.
Evagrius Ponticus. Chapters on Prayer. Trans. John Eudes Bamberger. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1981.
Gregory the Great. Homilies on the Gospels (Homiliae in Evangelia). In Patrologia Latina, vol. 76. Ed. J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1857.
Gregory the Great. Regula Pastoralis. Trans. Henry Davis. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1950.
Guigo II. Scala Claustralium (The Ladder of Monks). Trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1981.
John of the Cross. Living Flame of Love (Llama de amor viva). In The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. Trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. Washington: ICS Publications, 1991.
John of the Cross. Ascent of Mount Carmel; Dark Night of the Soul. In The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. Trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. Washington: ICS Publications, 1991.
John Paul II. Novo Millennio Ineunte. Apostolic Letter. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2001.
Paul VI. Lumen Gentium. Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1964.
Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Apophthegmata Patrum). Trans. Benedicta Ward. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1975.
Teresa of Ávila. The Life (Libro de la Vida). In The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Ávila, vol. 1. Trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. Washington: ICS Publications, 1976. [Cited as Vida by chapter and section.]
Teresa of Ávila. The Interior Castle (Castillo Interior). In The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Ávila, vol. 2. Trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. Washington: ICS Publications, 1980.
Secondary Sources
Bouyer, Louis. Introduction to Spirituality. Trans. Mary Perkins Ryan. New York: Desclée, 1961.
Bonaventure. Itinerarium Mentis in Deum. Trans. Philotheus Boehner. Saint Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1956.
de Lubac, Henri. Medieval Exegesis. Trans. Mark Sebanc and E. M. Macierowski. 3 vols. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998–2009.
Leclercq, Jean. The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture. Trans. Catharine Misrahi. New York: Fordham University Press, 1961.
McGinn, Bernard. The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism. 6 vols. New York: Crossroad, 1991–2017.
Torrell, Jean-Pierre. Saint Thomas Aquinas. Vol. 1: The Person and His Work. Trans. Robert Royal. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1996.
Turner, Denys. The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
© Jean Khoury / School of Mary — schoolofmary.org