Are Growth and Conversion Being Confused in the Spiritual Life? Is Conversion Really Continuing?

An eighty-seven year old learned Benedictine monk in the course of his presentation at a conference on spirituality calls out a thin but consistent thematic strand in Christian mystical tradition emblematized as “God and I are one.” At that moment and in that place his meaning is worlds away from the New Age novice who professes the same, a Christian neophyte who is confident she has witnessed pantheism first hand, some theologians whose ire is raised with the critique his position lacks alterity, one or two who leave the room because they are scandalized by the monk’s apparent pretension at diluting divinity with humanity, some for whom his message seems to contradict the astonishment of their first experience of God as Living Other, a handful who confess their unfamiliarity with mystical epistemology but grant the monk the benefit of the doubt, and one person for whom the monk’s remark is corroborated with the Holy Spirit. True to form the workshop finishes with loose ends, pressing questions, and even some back room accusations. The monk might remind the attendees of Saint Catherine of Genoa’s words, “my self is God, nor is any other self known to me except my God,”¹ or of Jesus’ prayer to his Father “that they may be one as we are one” (Jn. 17:22b) that accommodates the quasi-alterity of God. These might otherwise give pause, or at the very least lend analogous support to his statement, but this would only quiet the objections without addressing their underlying cause.

There is no reasoning that can align these distinct interpretive worlds orbiting the singular contentious point, and no brilliant logic can thaw their respective intractable judgments. Accusations to the contrary, the disagreements do not stem from someone departing from a core doctrine or being doctrinaire, that she is morally relativist or classicist, or because he is mistaken with the facts, and no intuitive leap can make up for the communication shortfall. Granted, clashes routinely occur among rival versions of truth and morality because the underlying premises are incommensurate, conflicts do erupt from rattling ideological attachments, and disagreements always arise because a position has been poorly framed, but all things being equal no wordsmithing or oratorical nuance can bend these sorts of conflict back into shape. No qualification will help. The disagreements at the fictitious conference cannot be mediated by a theological Esperanto that speaks to a common religious experience because it does not exist within the discussion’s parameters. The phrase “religious experience” rings familiar but the assertion “God and I are one” does not.

Spring Growth Sepia.

Courtesy of Gary Williams

These divergences reflect the order of intelligibility of meaning, its controls, its contexts, and its pedigree. One statement has manifold interpretations, and to understand the scenarios that fall under this regime one must look to the polymorphic symbolic nature of language that mediates worlds of meaning, as the Canadian theologian and philosopher Bernard Lonergan describes it:

If one is to understand this enormous diversity, one must, I believe, advert to the sundry differentiations of human consciousness. A first differentiation arises in the process of growing up. The infant lives in a world of immediacy. The child moves towards a world mediated by meaning. For the adult the real world is the world mediated by meaning, and his philosophic doubts about the reality of that world arise from the fact that he has failed to advert to the difference between the criteria for a world of immediacy and, on the other hand, the criteria for the world mediated by meaning.²

If this fundamental distinction of the worlds of immediacy and meaning can be trusted, it appears that the conference attendees were unwittingly caught in a web of undifferentiated meanings. In the final analysis their reactions were emissaries from different states of religious consciousness and maturity. In striking corroboration with Lonergan’s statement, the great twentieth-century Thomist and mystical theologian Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange describes how these differentiation of meaning function...