Spiritual theology and its challenges

Symposium of Spiritual Theology began this afternoon at the UPS. The symposium has been planned for months to bring together theologians from a number of the pontifical and Catholic faculties in Rome, Naples, Bologna, Milano, Torino. The director of our Institute of Spiritual Theology, Jesús Manuel Garcia has been the prime organizer.

Professore Don Jesús Manuel Garcia

It was last July that I received the first notification of this symposium, but I did not receive any follow-up emails… I presume because don Garcia has a mixup of my email address in his address book. In any case, I have been able to participate, and while many of the talks are striking, I want to just put down some raw ideas that I have picked up.

The symposium is held in Sala Viganò, in the University Library

Padre Luigi Borriello, a Carmelite and professor of Spiritual Theology at the Teresianum, stressed that one of the difficulties of Spiritual Theology is that there is not one measure for speaking of spirituality. There is not one term that the Church uses, or that Christians use. There are so many models of holiness that to speak systematically of only one way will diminish everyone.

Father Borriello

In this way, Spiritual Theology is not like dogmatic theology or moral theology. These follow singular methods. It is the same with biblical, liturgical and pastoral theology. Here, instead, we are talking of lived-experience and praxis. Better, it is lived-experience in charity (I was hungry, I was thirsty…).

So there is a gap between theology and holiness. The theologian that attempted to fill the gap was Urs Von Balthassar. He speaks of mystical hagiography. You cannot talk about a saint as one who is holy before birth. It is the lived-experience, heroic effort to live the Gospel. It cannot be quietism. Every saint has a mission in the world, to people, to let them learn that God meets them where they are. There is One who is Holy, but there are many ways to respond to God in the lives of each one.

To put it another way, there is each believer must find his or her own way to live the gift of faith received. No one is a replica of someone else (this is the path to abstraction and not responsibility) but each struggles with the realities, the setbacks, the victories, the opposition to call God inside his or her life, and then to respond.

God’s action and the response of human nature; a welcoming of the divine and human effort to receive that presence. It is always subjective because they all live in different contexts, in different histories, with different personalities, weaknesses, talents, relationships, histories. Sanctity is theology lived, not theology theorized. This is the sense of Thomas who affirms, «All these words are straw». One thing is necessary, Union with God.  So we can ask, are all mystics saints? Are all saints mystics?

Interesting! Great talk. Of course, the moral theologian at the symposium did not agree because he seem to see spiritual theology as a duplication of moral theology and specifically of virtue ethics.

Fr Borriello’s response: what did John Paul II and Benedict XVI do in Assisi at a stretch of 25 years distance? They did not call dogmatic or moral theologians. They prayed with the representatives of many different faiths and religions and non-religions. They prayed together.

Someone in theology needs to offer to all those in theology an incentive to continually receive the Word, and challenge all to understand the Word better because it is lived.

Don Pier Lugi Boracco, professor of theology at the Facolta Teologica di Italia Settentrionale (FTIS), offered an interesting image of the work of Spiritual Theology. It is like a musical composition played by different orchestras and sounding very different. The musical score is legible; the sound is very different according to the abilities, tastes and so much more of each different orchestra. Still, the music is alive, also for this -- and the pleasure is that we can hear the same music interpreted in many different ways. And spirituality or holiness can be understood in this sense.

Well, my reflections, as I have said, are very raw. Do not worry: the official acts of this symposium will be published, and everyone can see the clarity of these theologians points in that final text. All that I am saying is that it is interesting to sit with these problems and thoughts and insights.