Editor’s note: The following lecture given, in slighly different form, to open an ecumenical symposium at Bjärka Säby. The lecture was followed by a public conversation with Professor Sarah Coakley. It was published originally on the author’s CoramFratribus.com site and appears here with his kind permission.
I was a doctoral student when a friend passed on to me a second-hand copy of a book by the Belgian Benedictine Jean Déchanet, a monk of Saint-André de Bruges. Déchanet, born in 1906, was known to me as a medieval scholar. His work on William of Saint-Thierry, the chief intellectual among the twelfth-century school of Cistercian Fathers, has defined much modern reception of that attractive, subtle thinker. Déchanet established a Latin edition of William’s Golden Epistle, which he also translated. Given this backdrop, I was puzzled by the title and content of the book given me. In French it was published in 1956, complete with an Imprimatur, as, La Voie du silence: Yoga pour chrétien. The English version produced four years later by Harper in New York was called more straightforwardly, Christian Yoga.
So was this austere examiner of manuscripts, a man seemingly at home in a monastic environment à la Eco’s The Name of the Rose, at the same time some kind of hippie, drawn like the Beatles by the mystique and stillness of the fragrant Orient?
Fr Déchanet countered this predictable objection in his preface to the third edition of La Voie du silence, out in 1963 after the book had sold tens of thousands of copies. Not only, he pointed out, was his interest in yoga not at odds with his study of the medieval theologian. It was a consequence of such engagement. He wrote:
I was led to Yoga by William of Saint-Thierry. For twenty years I lived under the aegis and influence of his living psychology, which in turn had been taken and adapted from Origen (himself an Oriental). My chief concern has been to ensure that in me there should exist that balance of anima, animus and spiritus which he makes the precondition […] of the unfolding in man of the grace of our Lord, and of the transition from the image (the mark of which is clearly set on these ‘three’) to divine resemblance. The creature, cut off from God by sin and divided, moreover, within himself, cannot entertain the hope of finding his Creator or his lost intimacy with him otherwise than by first of all making use of the grace of Christ the Redeemer and of his power and example, in order to fashion himself anew in the image of God, to re-establish unity in himself, and to rediscover the natural order in the order of charity.
William’s position as retold by Déchanet instances a soaring intuition that informed much twelfth-century enterprise as European Christians increasingly sensed the potential nobility of embodied human nature. Of course, this intuition was not universally shared. It struggled, like any new life, to be born. By way of example, Helen Waddell amiably contrasts the perception of Bernard of Clairvaux with that of his younger contemporary, the philosopher Bernard Sylvestris, herald of a catholic synthesis accomplished in the next, thirteenth century, which produced persons and monuments that still hold out to us a measure of what we think of as ‘humane’. Waddell calls this synthesis a ‘Truce of God’, a reconciliation that ended at last an age-old war between the spirit and the flesh, ‘even as the Last Judgement of the Western rose-window in Chartres melts into “heaven’s own colour, blue”.’ Where Bernard of Clairvaux had spoken of ‘the dungheap of the flesh’, she notes, Bernard Sylvestris saw in the union of flesh and spirit ‘a discipline that made for greatness, and the body itself a not ignoble hospice for the pilgrim soul.’
The Cistercian Bernard, harsh in his quips, treated his own flesh harshly. Excessive mortification forced him early in his abbacy to take a time of monastic sick-leave in a hermitage near Clairvaux. That was where William of Saint Thierry, still a Benedictine, first met him in 1118. The two became firm friends. It is plausible that they talked even then of the body’s status in man’s spiritual quest. William harboured the conviction that our body is intrinsic to who we are, constituting not just a tent to shelter our sojourn in this vale of tears but an intentionally imaged reality susceptible of Godlikeness. William’s tripartite anthropology, to which Déchanet refers, conceives of the human being as a composite of physicality, soul-reason, and spirit. These distinctions shape The Golden Epistle’s three-part division taking us from Animal Man (the human being considered in its embodiment), through Rational Man (accounting for man’s intellective faculties), to Spiritual Man (envisaging transformation by grace), not as if these were successive scores to be rehearsed, one surpassing the other, but as a perfectly balanced polyphonic motet.
Déchanet was not content to expound this anthropology in monographs. He wanted, he says, to ‘to ensure that in me there should exist that balance of anima, animus and spiritus’. He was a monk, pursuing theology as part of his overall quest, on which he had staked his life, to behold what St Benedict calls ‘the deifying light’ and to be transformed, remade by it. Déchanet’s personal circumstances raised the stakes. He says he had been ‘an invalid from childhood on’ — suffering cruelly from epilepsy — ‘but when I was about forty, I was providentially cured, and felt a consuming urge to live’. The French original speaks of ‘un impérieux besoin de vivre’, a need entertained as an imperative, as if in intimate response to an oracle like that addressed to Ezekiel in the parable of the unsalted, unswaddled infant whom the Lord picks up and raises high: ‘I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live’ (16.6).
I was stirred by that passage when I read it as a young man. I also wanted, needed to live. I still find Déchanet’s text a compelling statement of Christian purpose. That is not, though, my reason for invoking it. I want instead to point to a self-evident but still curious paradox: when this cultured Belgian Benedictine avid for life in his fifth decade, having taught himself to swim at 42, loosening up his limbs, sought an effectivetool with which to spiritualise his body in pursuit of his animus’s harmonious union with anima and spiritus, he spontaneously looked towards yoga, rehearsing asanas after vigils in his cell before an open window.
Yoga, of course, was in the air. Paramahansa Yogananda had published his Autobiography of a Yogi in 1946 after a quarter-century of energetic teaching in the United States. Millions read, and still read, this book. Steve Jobs had copies handed out to all those who attended his memorial service at Stanford on 16 October 2011, a posthumous benefaction. In the 1950s the West encountered, too, the hugely influential teachings of B.K.S. Iyengar whose chief ambassador was the violinist Yehudi Menuhin. Menuhin maintained that the practice of yoga had liberated his playing. He called Iyengar ‘my best violin teacher’. Yogananda and Iyengar are but two high-profile proponents of a more general trend eliciting in Boston, London, and Paris a massive, enchanted response. Monks, like everyone else, became curious. Fr Bede Griffiths practised yoga at Farnborough in the years following World War II, and left for India in 1955, as did Fr Francis Acharya, a Trappist of Scourmont who founded Kurisumala. Fr Jules Monchanin, a diocesan priest with monastic aspirations, had lived in India since 1939 and was joined there in 1948 by Fr Henri Le Saux of Kergonan, later known throughout the world as Abishiktananda.
These Catholic clerics were intelligent and articulate. Their reports from the spiritual front line, thought by many to lie in the Far East, trickled into the remotest cloisters, setting off a wave of interest, enquiry, and experimentation. Déchanet may have practised ‘The Serpent’, ‘The Dolphin’, ‘The Folded Leaf’, and other yogic postures in solitude at Saint André, but all over Europe were monks and nuns, not to mention countless lay people, doing the same. The lasting impact of this movement is obvious. So-called ‘Christian Yoga’ is a mainstream phenomenon now.
I have sketched an aspirational movement that began gently in Europe and the US after the First World War, picked up momentum after the Second, then became a tidal wave in the 1960s, corresponding to the yearning of people in a fast-moving, ever more materialist West truly to inhabit their bodies and to realise a deeply felt hunch that their physical self is a reliable bearer of sense. Menuhin wrote in a foreword to Iyengar’s book Light on Yoga in 1980:
Reduced to our own body, our first instrument, we learn to play it, drawing from it maximum resonance and harmony. With unflagging patience we refine and animate every cell […], unlocking and liberating capacities otherwise condemned to frustration and death.
This purpose of self-realisation acquires special poignancy in a Christian optic which holds that the human being is made, made entirely, in the image of God. One can see how a sincere and thoughtful Christian like Fr Déchanet would pursue it with contemplative conviction, giving rise to a school of practice.
Having established as much, let us leave our Christian yogis distended in a posture of repose while we turn our minds to a simultaneous, in many ways parallel, development in Western Christianity during the second half of the twentieth century.
For is it not both interesting and odd that the corporate turning of attention towards the Far East of both Catholics and Protestants avid for spirituality grounded in ritualised physical discipline should have coincided with a thoroughgoing deritualisation of inherited forms of worship at home? This topic is a hot potato now, at any rate in Roman Catholic circles, where young people are keen to rediscover aspects of liturgy and ascetic practice abandoned in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, not, mostly, because the Council required it, but because the Council’s reception to such an extent unfolded within the context of a cultural climate enthused by prospects of starting out afresh from clean slates with minimalist utilitarian means: the equivalence in ecclesiastical reform of Cripps’s architecture.
Today’s young seekers find themselves reprimanded by a predominantly elderly establishment formed by the thrills and anxieties of that revolutionary time, which, to state the obvious, is chronologically further removed from them than the Treaty of Versailles was from youths waving banners on Parisian barricades in 1968, and in many ways quite as significant of a lost world.
It is not my purpose to engage in polemics. What interests me, rather, is to explore an aspect of today’s so-called liturgical ‘conservatism’ that I sense has been overlooked, namely its physical and ascetic, if you like, its ‘yogic’ aspect, which cannot be brushed aside, it seems to me, as an expression of purportedly ‘retrograde’ or ‘rigid’ tendency, for it stands for the opposite: a yearning to be made new in Christ, and malleable. I will make my case by means of a brisk analysis of the Ritual of the pre-conciliar Roman missal, which can, over and above its sublime aspect, be read as a manual of sacred gymnastics.
The possibility of Mass taking place at all rests on two paragraphs, 807-8, of the 1917 Code of Canon Law. Laying down parameters for licit celebration, they define that ‘priests conscious of grave sin, no matter how contrite they believe themselves to be, shall not dare to celebrate Mass without prior sacramental confession’; next, that ‘it is not licit for priests to celebrate without having observed a natural fast from midnight’. The celebrant is submitted to a discipline both moral and corporal. Soul and body are readied in advance for the eucharistic sacrifice, which no one may presume to improvise. The ordained are to be configured to it, not it to them.
The requirement of fasting may have seemed innocuous enough to a cheerily rotund cathedral canon going to bed at 11 to rise at 6 and say Mass at 7, just downstairs, thereafter to tuck into sausages and eggs. But imagine being a priest in Nigeria, say, walking for hours in the forenoon sun to an outstation, carrying your portable altar on your back, without being able even to take a sip of water. Certain verses of the Psalms — ‘my flesh faints for thee’ (Ps 63.1), ’my soul thirsts for thee like a parched land’ (Ps 143.6) — will have seemed overwhelmingly real, then. One would have been conscious of the ‘supersubstantial bread’ as truly nourishment.
The double requirement of confession and fasting was incumbent not only on priests but on any Catholic going to communion. In The Burning Bush, Sigrid Undset tells of the novel’s hero Paul Selmer, a Catholic convert, attending a bridge night in stodgy gentlemanly company during World War I. The other players noticed that he did not refill his whisky-and-soda past midnight. Asked why, Paul said he would go to Mass in the morning and intended to receive the sacrament. At this, the company was aghast (ch. II.2). It is a trivial scene, in a way. At the same time, it is a lofty one. It speaks of the deliberate integration of spiritual discipline into ordinary life; of an existence oriented, even in its social aspect, towards a transcendent goal.
No doubt some revision of the Church’s rules was called for: the admission to break the fast with water, say, or medication. The erosion, though, went much further. The current rule is to fast for an hour before taking communion, which more or less just rules out munching sandwiches in the pews, a practice from which most churchgoers would anyway refrain from considerations of courtesy.
A communicant under the old dispensation knew that the state of one’s body is not indifferent to the state of one’s soul. People these days must latch on to guru-dieticians for such insight, and are evidently hungry for it. Fasting is a fashionable lifestyle option now, but almost entirely divorced from the practice of faith.
The Ritual stipulates that a priest, before offering Mass, must recite Vigils and Lauds, then spend time in silent prayer. In today’s secular context, this would be called a mindfulness exercise. He prepares the missal and sacred vessels, then washes his hands, praying: ‘Give strength to my hands, Lord, to wipe away every stain, that I may be apt to serve you in purity of mind and body.’ The commitment implicit in his fasting is explicitly affirmed.
This is when the rite proper begins and all spontaneity ceases, much the way a woman or man attending a yoga class will, after warm-up, embark on a series of asanas minutely defined even in the subtle transitions from one to the next, requiring concentration and balance, enabling practitioners to be caught up in a movement that exceeds them. The priest is reminded that he is not the subject of the impending celebration; he is its vehicle. His task is to disappear into the words and gestures assigned to him, submitting, as a deliberate subject, to an objective reality.
The procedure of vesting recalls the last chapter of Ephesians, which itemises ‘the armour of God’, associating specific parts of kit with distinct virtues (6.10-17). Taking the amict that covers his head like a hood before Mass, the priest asks the Lord to furnish a ‘helmet of salvation’ to ward off diabolical distraction. Putting on the alb, a linen garment covering his body, he prays that, ‘washed in the Blood of the Lamb’, he may live up to the grace won for him by obtaining a clean heart. Binding the cincture round his waist he prays for continence and chaste strength. The maniple tied to his left arm is symbolically a handkerchief with which to wipe the tears he will not fail to weep if he invests himself in the eucharistic mystery. The stole represents the primordial dignity of Adam issuing from God’s creative hand: ‘Restore to me, Lord’, prays the priest, ‘the stole of immortality I lost in my forefather’s prevarication. I am unworthy to approach your great mystery! Grant me nonetheless to know eternal joy!’ Finally, on top of all this comes the chasuble symbolising Christ’s sweet yoke, his light burden, held in place by strings wound tightly round the celebrant’s body before being tied upon his heart in a knot. At this point, he is like a soldier fit for battle, helmeted and cuirassed. The outward exercise of doffing ordinary garments and donning sacred ones prompts the interiorisation, day by day, of the Pauline injunction to shed the old man and put on the new.
The priest proceeds to the altar ‘with eyes downcast, at a grave pace, his body held erect’. The postural specification regards the verticality specific to man in which the Fathers saw a sign of dignity and a heavenward call. One does not approach the living God slouching. Yet the celebrant’s attention is fixed on what lies ahead. He is not to look curiously around, but to focus on the task awaiting him, praying: ‘I shall approach the altar of the Lord, the God who gives joy to my youth’’ (Ps 42.4).
The liturgy begins at the altar steps, with the priest and acolyte performing a little set dialogue. It moves from a statement of purpose through a cry for God’s help to a confession of sin. The priest confesses first. He receives the prayer for forgiveness from his minister, which is noteworthy. He cannot function at the altar unless, first, he is prayed for by a server who traditionally has been a child. Thus he is exhorted, again, that he acts, not in his own strength but in grace received; even as he openly confesses before, during, and after Mass his personal unworthiness.
To observe from a distance this preliminary rite, the ascent to the altar, then the unfolding of Mass is to witness, when the rubrics are carefully kept, a sacred choreography made up of steps to the right, a return to the centre, steps to the left, revolutions, genuflexions and bows, inclinations and benedictions, all within a continuous fluency of movement, quite as in a yogic session. The smallest gestures carry messages. A nod of the head shows a mention of the name of Jesus, his Mother, or the saint of the day. The priest’s bended knee, like Solomon’s at the dedication of the temple, speaks of God’s bright presence in his sanctuary. The priest is tactilely referenced to the altar, resting his hands there when they are not otherwise engaged, kissing it before turning round to address the congregation, visibly the altar’s emissary. Even the configuration of his fingertips is kerygmatic.
What does this sort of practice do to a person performing it? Allritual can in theory become mindless performance, naturally. The secret is therefore to keep the mind engaged, the will mobilised, with animus, anima, and spiritus invested in the same unifying purpose: a corporate Godward movement in union with Christ, to render his saving sacrifice present and effective for the sustenance and sanctification of the Church. It requires presence of mind and determined self-surrender to keep this multitude of simultaneous prescriptions well. There is labour involved and notable mortification at first; but as the ritual gradually, with practice, becomes second nature, body and mind are freed, enabling a singular intensity of spiritual concentration. The intelligent daily repetition of such significant actions cannot but be formative. Outward actions impact for ill or good on the conscious mind and sensitive spirit. Any yoga manual worth its salt will explain how this process works.
As for the assembly of the faithful drawn into the rite by means of an active participationproperly theirs, what they behold is a person absorbed on their behalf by a noble, beautiful activity. Such a sight is always moving. Think of seeing Casals perform a cello suite by Bach or Margot Fonteyn dance the death of Giselle; think of watching an Olympic diver, a stone carver fixing a gaze of tenderness in marble, a delivery man unloading a palletful of Ming vases. The most venerable of human functions, the confection of Christ’s Body and Blood in an act of rational worship, surely calls for no less a degree of deliberation and concentration?
It is this intuition, I believe, that stirs the heart of many young women and men today. I cannot see that it is false. No, in a time weighed down by artificiality, leaden rhetoric, dud personality cults, frantic ‘innovations’ of terrifying banality in stagecraft, political campaigning, and liturgical practice, a quest for objective, oblative expression in sacred functions appears to me sound, and forward-looking.
I hazard a further proposition, aware of the risk attached. The Catholic Church lives with a modern legacy of clerical abuse that constitutes an open gash in the ecclesiastical Body. Abuse is an age-old phenomenon present in every period, each cultural environment; in our day, other churches and institutions, too, are afflicted by it. At one level, it pertains to a timeless mysterium iniquitatis and to man’s capacity for wickedness. There seems to be no doubt, though, that the incidence of priestly abuse in the Roman Catholic Church rose sharply from the early 1960s, coinciding with the relinquishing of physical, ritual discipline in life and worship.
Clearly, many priests had found the old liturgical form, the Mass with its inflexible rubrics, 16 genuflexions and 52 signs of the cross, suffocating. Many were hungry for spontaneous expression. What followed was the often tedious, sometimes destructive emergence of the priest as personality. Whether or not endowed with much charisma, whether or not a learned theologian or able preacher, he found himself in the centre as service-provider and visual focus of attention, with substantial executive freedom to mould rites to his form and whim, promoting or discarding at will others’ partaking. It is documented that physical abuse is almost always prepared and preceded by spiritual manipulation sprung from claims to personal authority or even fancied omnipotence based on some delusional, semi-mystical idea amounting to the claim: ‘I am special, I am in charge, I do as I please’.
All of us are susceptible to such megalomaniac illusion. The more closely we are associated with a sacred office, the more potentially lethal and luciferian this tendency becomes, inflating our perception of self. There may have been wisdom in an economy that ascetically reined in the presumption of sacred ministers, requiring them daily to regulate their appetites, to multiply restate their vocational purpose, to enact an intricate ritual calling for an ex officio obliteration of self, thereby to grow in the grace of discipleship and to be effective, christophorous channels of grace, not deluding themselves for a moment that they are somehow grace’s source.
I am not saying that the answer to all today’s ecclesiastical traumas is found in a return to old usages. Complex issues do not have such easy remedies, alas. What I am saying is this: it seems short-sighted to brush aside the hunger of many young Christians for ritual, ascesis, symbols, and formality by branding it as imbecile nostalgia, with the supreme indictment of it being anti-modern, anti-inclusive, or, in a Catholic context, anti-conciliar. The watchword of Vatican II was: ‘Return to the sources!’ To drink deeply from the sources is precisely what the young want. Why not help them? Why not enable them to find within their own tradition, a patrimony rightfully theirs, time-tested practices apt to help them grow in Christ instead of leaving them to the vaguely ethereal hunches of Steve Jobs?
The great Christian problem today is the problem of the human person and of the human body. We need a Christocentric conversion in mind and manners to make sense of our significant being, to account for our origin and end, our longings and frustrations, our wounds and our capacity for healing. To engage and counter a secular insinuation that ‘I’ — whatever ‘I’ might be — am a stranger in my body and that my body is potentially inimical to ‘me’, we need a revival of William of Saint Thierry’s reasoned conviction that my body is me, that its call is noble, even beatific, inseparable from the potential of my intellective and spiritual faculties. We may find then that our endeavour to operate a personal union of animus, anima, and spiritus does not necessarily need to take a detour via yoga. The Christian West could do with recovering a love for and a confidence in its own tradition, much the way the Cistercians did in the twelfth century, inaugurating a period of manifold flourishing.
Why cross the river in order to draw water? The Church has vast experience when it comes to the embodied application of Christian faith in God’s incarnation, which elevates our nature indescribably. Christians have sought to join the body to the spirit’s pursuits in various ways. My superficial perusal of the Ritual pointed towards a particular treasure. There are others. A re-evaluation of Christian fasting is overdue. Much can be learnt from the ascesis of monastics, at once idealists and realists. The practice of prostrations in prayer is worthy of recovery; it is a feature, not just of Byzantine piety but also, in the West, of Cistercian, Carthusian, and Mendicant devotion. Processions and pilgrimages, prominent in our tradition, provide privileged means of exercising the body in prayer. And of course, there is the prayer of the heart, whose blatantly physical aspect can appear disconcerting.
The best modern disquisition known to me on this subject happens to be of western origin. It is a treatise written by Dom André Poisson, prior of La Grande Chartreuse, so superior general of the Carthusian Order, from 1967 to 1997, the decades during which so many western Christians turned towards the Far East in search of body-spirit unity. The treatise, dated ‘Christmas 1983’, is redolent with the grace of the Word’s incarnation, ever the foundation of Christian anthropology.
Dom Poisson insists that the ‘prayer of the heart’ cannot be reduced to an abstraction as if the ‘heart’, in this instance, were purely symbolic. ‘Every movement of the heart’, he says, ‘that contributes to our relation with the Father is linked to our sensible, material being. From experience, perhaps at some cost to our health, we know that truly profound emotions attain our physical heart.’ He stresses that ‘we cannot enter the prayer of the heart unless we accept to live deliberately and determinedly at the level of our body’. Why do we find this so hard to take on board within our normal setting, looking instead for exotic practices and new idioms?
Possibly because we tend to live and think as implicit dualists, conceiving of our bodies as repositories of appetites, pains, pleasures, and intimate excretions with no bearing on what we think of as our ‘higher’ self, as unwieldy frames of which we are often embarrassed, so that we rule outtheir involvement in the realisation of our theological finality. Do we in fact own our body as a place of encounter with God not just in the eschaton but now? Do we believe in the body’s fitness for resurrection?
Dom Poisson, truly a monk and therefore a person steeped in liturgy, develops his perspective within a eucharistic ecclesiology:
Even as it is impossible to approach life in community as if our brothers were disincarnate beings of pure spirit, to be reached somehow beyond their physical wrapping, it would be a denial of the reality of God’s love to turn the physical, material, palpable presence of the Son-with-us into an abstraction.
St Antony the Great said, ‘With our neighbour is life and death’, an insight St Silouan of Athos distilled into, ‘My brother is my life’. That affirmation is at once experiential and conceptual, enabled by a mystery of communion effected through material realities that are the Son of God. ‘Similarly’, writes Dom Poisson — and there is considerable daring in that only apparently casual adverb:
Similarly, our own body, with its heaviness, limits, and constraints, is the reality of what we are. It is my body that touches that other reality of which Jesus said: ‘This is my Body.’ […] I cannot possibly pray without praying in my body. When I turn towards God, I cannot abstract my incarnate reality. It is not just a question of religious discipline if certain gestures are prescribed, if certain material conditions direct me, when I turn to God. These are pointers to the one and only truth: God loves me the way he made me. Why should I want to be more spiritual than he?
The question is rhetorical. It nonetheless challenges a number of ecclesiastical projects, strategies, reforms, and synodal ventures of the past six or seven decades, during which the Church, bang in the middle of the sexual revolution, has often tended, weirdly, to leave the body behind, preferring concepts to praxis. Impatience with this state of affairs seems to me a sign of Christian health. In the coming year we shall commemorate the seventeenth centenary of the Council of Nicaea, at which the Church of East and West proclaimed with one voice the reality of the Word’s incarnation. It would seem a fitting opportunity to reaffirm the grace bestowed thereby upon our flesh, and the prospect of worshipful dignity such grace enables.
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Satan hates ritual.
Satan hates the human body because Christ assumed one and redeemed man who is an embodied spirit.
Satan is succeeding in having destroyed the ritual in which man once found meaning.
Satan is succeeding in using the body so that man can destroy himself which is another way of saying to undo the work of redemption.
We need a theology today that clearly understands the designs of Satan, the role he plays in salvation and the tactics he is employing to achieve his ends.
I’m wondering why the masthead for this article refers to Bishop Varden as “Fr.”?
Maybe he wrote the article prior to episcopal ordination…Or perhaps he wishes not to be identified as a bishop. Some church fathers (e.g., Gregory of Nazianzen) really suffered at leaving their parish or monastery to serve as bishop. Maybe the Fr. title reflects a yearning.
Then again, it may be a simple editorial oversight.
This article reminds me of the beauty of the parables of Jesus. They are short but have tremendous content. This article is very long and I will not comment on its power.
Well, I struggled with its rhythm, but then I began to experience precisely the mind-body-spirit fullness about which he wrote. It was long, but so are many things in life we endure, to our benefit. I thought of Christ on the cross, struggling with every breath, suffocating on that cross, and I kept thanking God; the VO grants the priest and the faithful participants the ritualized sanction and the ‘rite’ of grace to sign ourselves with the power and the glory and the suffering of the Trinitarian Christ as he once offered and currently offers and will eternally offer Himself for us.
The power of the essay surely has a hidden aspect but I found it and then kept it like a pearl in a field.
Balance is the challenge. Benedictine Déchanet learning to swim at 42 marks return to ancient Greece, the health of body essential to health of mind. Carthusian superior general Dom Poisson gives the effort notable affirmation equating spiritual advance with the sensual body that belongs to the heart, the place where we designate our love.
Yoga, India’s psychology of mind and body is indeed a strong draw of Western souls East. All who tout it speak in terms of religiosity. Here is where the fragile balance between Bernard of Clairvaux’s severe austerity, virtual banishment of the body to the spirit and flesh accord of Bernard Sylvestris. Varden the finesse intellectual notes their companionship as a form of compatability.
Like Trondheim’s Trappist Bishop Varden this writer finds the multitude of signs of the cross, many genuflections [I add strict almost robotic bodily movement in sink with assistants] of the ancient Liturgy “suffocating”. The Novus Ordo is a form of deliverance. Agreed that presently there’s an escape from the body in an extreme effort to the spiritual, an abeyance that appears unnatural. Although the balance between the two isn’t always met in this life.
I take the unexpected death of Trappist Fr Thomas Merton in Southeast Asia, Merton on his way to study Japan’s Zen Buddhism a sign, an omen if you wish. Man, due to his weakness tends to rationalize in favor of engaging the sensual, that after all it may be the better choice to be excessive toward severity and the spiritual. If we envision Christ as he lived portrayed in the Gospels he comes across as severe and ascetic, with an occasional breaking of bread and cup of wine and more for sake of his adversaries.
Fr Morello, I should agree. Personally I found the work of Fr Merton to be a move AWAY from Catholic spirituality. I just threw his book away. We have St L de Monfort, why do we need to read Merton?
Yes Nathan. He started off well, his Seven Story Mountain, early descriptions of the monastic life were wonderful reading. It seemed he wasn’t able to live as a contemplative in the manner of St John of the Cross, to find what he sought in the hermitage the Trappists built for him. He began to express dissatisfaction. He was a Trappist in 1942 when His younger brother was killed during a flight failure during the War. Later, during the Vietnam War his writing revealed a lean toward activism, anti war sentiment, finally interest in Zen Buddhism. Perhaps God mercifully took him before he wandered off.
I could not read the text fully; it was scattered so I read only some parts and read the rest diagonally. As an ex-occultist (one who also studied yoga with the real “guru” and also one who is familiar with Jung) I am compelled to say the following.
There is no such a thing as “yoga for a body”. It is a spiritual discipline which enables its adept to become god-like. I had that experience, of an unlimited power and zero need in God because I became one. I became totally free. It was a very seductive state. I was a Christian at that point; I began practicing yoga for health reasons; I did not know what would happen. As an ex-occultist, I immediately recognized the darkish nature of my experience. I saw that “it” offered me power but took me away from Christ. It took me an enormous effort to reject it. Later I stopped yoga forever, despite its positive influence on my health. Being an occultist in the past I felt that yoga “re-activates” in me those occult connections if you like. Yoga is not compatible with Christianity; you cannot take just physical aspects of it and use it as some ignorant Westerners think. If you begin practicing it your spirit will be unnoticeably affected slowly taking you away from Christ. Eventually there will be a wall between Him and you will not even notice it. I see the traces of that spiritual disease in Murton and others like him, in “centering prayer” and so on. There is no Christ there.
Next, Carl Jung. Sorry, his system is occult – and not because of psychoanalysis but because of his gnostic/Kabbalah which permeates the psychoanalysis. If anyone is interested in good psychoanalysis without an occult i.e. perfectly compatible with Christianity, I recommend Erich Fromm especially.
What I am trying to convey here with the full conviction of an ex-occultist: a Christian must never try to use anything that has a spiritual aspect which is contrary to Christianity. Those who say it is OK say so only out of their ignorance and lack of experience in those matters.
In my opinion, that “homage to the East” which the author of the text seems to approve, happened only for one reason: the Roman Catholic Church forgot its own authentic mystical tradition. It recalls it stopped teaching mystical theology in 18c. and here is the result. One who does not know about the experiences of John of the Cross or St Bernard or St Catherine of Siena etc. think the Church has no means for coming to the union with Our Lord so they go for yoga which offers them the union with oneself.
“… it was scattered …”
How so? It was quite cogent and cohesive for me.
And the author did not endorse or condemn yoga, but made a comparison, with an eye to the context of the 1960s, etc. His main point is quite clear: Western, modern man has responded to the innate need to employ one’s body in spirituality and worship by following a number of paths, but it is only in Christ and in the worship of the true God that this desire can be met and satisfied. And, following that, the current trend among some churchmen to cut off people from traditions and worship that involves a full and complex use of the body is counter-productive, even harmful.
Your comment made me look into the text again. My opinion did not change but I put it in different words: it is verbose and its structure sank into the many words. Obviously, it is a matter of taste but I prefer clear, well-structured writing – and not necessarily short. A long but well-structured, clear essay cannot be called “verbose”. However, I did not comment for the sake of criticizing the form, I only mentioned it to explain my diagonal reading. As you wrote:
“And the author did not endorse or condemn yoga, but made a comparison, with an eye to the context of the 1960s, etc.”
This is precisely why I commented. The author implicitly gives a carte blanche to the practice of yoga. He throws in the names like the author of kriya yoga, he speaks of “Christian yoga” (there is no such a thing) which was practiced in the West – so it is all OK. He is the bishop and his duty is to warn about the spiritual dangers of yoga or at least say that he does not know. He did not (for whatever reason) so I had to do that.
By the way, what is “spiritus, anima, animus”? There is “spiritus, anima, corpus” in a proper Christian anthropology. Obviously, I know what anima and animus in Jungian take but “spiritus, anima, animus” make no sense when one speaks of the body (and the rest).
What really upsets me is often no reaction when I bring up the subject of Roman Catholic mysticism and the necessity of recovering it, putting it into practice. We need a body to engage in worship as well – well, get excited with the love of God and run all around the church shouting “Love! Love!”, dance like king David or do hundreds of prostrations like monks on Athos and it will be that “bodily expression”. My whole point is that “anima and spirit” are the first, they animate the body. If the bodily expression is caused by the mystical experience of Christ, of a joy of being with God then it is Christian. If some bodily expression is borrowed from other traditions, then it is not.
Fr. Varden does not sanction the practice of yoga, as far as I could read. Rather, I understood Fr. Varden’s interest to be in Monk Dechanet, the medieval scholar who studied William of Saint-Thierry. Fr. Varden strove to understand why Dechanet (and other monks) began the practice of yoga around the same time that Western Christianity began to simplify (and perhaps subvert the reason and meaning) of longstanding ascetic and liturgical ritual.
Fr. Varden says, in transiting from yoga to his contemplative intuition: “…let us leave our Christian yogis distended in a posture of repose while we turn our minds to a simultaneous, in many ways parallel, development in Western Christianity during the second half of the twentieth century.”
Fr. Varden leaves yoga exactly where he found it, in the first part of his essay. He used the fact of others turning to it as a springboard his major premise: As composite humans we are incarnate beings whose parts benefit and may be sanctified by practices of ascetics, rubrics, and rituals which our church in the most recent half century, has moved to remove.
“Fr. Varden strove to understand why Dechanet (and other monks) began the practice of yoga around the same time that Western Christianity began to simplify (and perhaps subvert the reason and meaning) of longstanding ascetic and liturgical ritual.”
It is very easy to understand, for an Eastern Orthodox who was taken by the writing of St John of the Cross, St Teresa of Avila, ‘Cloud of Unknowing’ and other mystical books of the Western mystics. St John of the Cross literally saved me by showing how to relate to Our Lord, the reality of that relationship – but how many in the Catholic Church know him and use his teaching? Without a close relationship with Him or an aspiration of such everything eventually becomes empty including Liturgy, Mass, prayer rule, fasting and so on. Christian theology is not a fruit of intellectual speculation, it is a fruit of KNOWING Jesus Christ the Person, personally, first by apostles/others and later by those who knew Him spiritually. This is mystical theology which animates and feeds intellect; intellect is dry without it. The Gospel of John is an example of such theology.
Later I learnt, to my shock, that the Roman Catholic Church stopped teaching mystical theology centuries ago. Well, if you stop teaching how to come to a close relationship with Our Lord/mystical union you have a huge hole in the heart of the Church. Naturally those people who want “the divine intimacy” (a title of a Carmelite book) start looking elsewhere. This is why Zen, yoga, “centering prayer” etc. (I must say I still do not get why Thomas Merton and others like him could not do what I did i.e. look into my own mystical tradition though.)
And so, the Roman Catholic Church seems to get some strange hybrid of Mass with Zen/yoga/transcendental meditation/whatever. I met some Carmelites who claimed they no longer pray to Jesus but do that meditation instead – they are so deluded that they see no problem with it! Now the Roman Catholic Church thinks “what should we do?” To me it is obvious what to do – return to your own mystical tradition, to a very practical discipline! All the aberrations are streaming from its loss, the loss of the purpose. For example, one is unable to see that the “ritualistic” Mass creates a perfect environment for contemplation. It stills both body and mind and directs a soul up.
To make a total, in my opinion all this “homages to the West” happened only as a consequence of a loss of own mystical tradition. It is a mystical tradition that caused an elaborate Mass. Away with mysticism – away with such Mass, let us now do something simple that will fit out quazi-Eastern “mystical” practices.
“Later I learnt, to my shock, that the Roman Catholic Church stopped teaching mystical theology centuries ago.”
That’s quite a claim. And a deeply flawed one. In fact, it is false, as books such as Called To Be the Children of God: The Catholic Theology of Human Deification, demonstrate. That book, which I co-edited (and wrote two chapters), shows how rich streams of spiritual and mystical theology have flowed down the centuries in the West via Thomism/neo-Thomism, the Franciscan tradition, the Benedictine tradition, the French school of theology (ie, St. Francis de Sales, Thérèse of Lisieux, etc), and individual authors such as Ligouri, Matthias Scheeben, John Henry Newman, and Abbott Marmion. Fr. Jordan Aumann’s classic text Christian Spirituality in the Catholic Tradition (Ignatius Press/Sheed & Ward, 1985) provides a very detailed study of copious amounts of said theology in the past few centuries in the West.
My personal library (30,000 volumes total) has several shelves of works on soteriology/spiritual theology. Just a quick glance and I see books such as In the Likeness of Christ (Sheed & Ward, 1950) by Rev. Edward Leen, CSSp (a followup to his book on mental prayer), Our Life in Christ: The Realization of Redemptive Incarnation (U of Notre Dame Press, 1962) by Albert L. Schlitzer, CSC, and The Mystical Evolution in the Development and Vitality of the Church (Herder, 1949) by Fr. John G. Arintero, OP. Numerous others could be listed here. And there has been a real increase of similar works in the past couple of decades.
I do agree with you that, in the West, the Church has often failed to convey these amazing truths. Even though they are prevalent in the texts of Vatican II and in the Catechism (my second chapter in the afore-mentioned book is titled “Deification in the Catechism of the Catholic Church). But that is quite different than saying they are not there are at, which I’ve found to be a common and wildly inaccurate claim made by many Eastern Orthodox folks.
“I do agree with you that, in the West, the Church has often failed to convey these amazing truths”
Well, this is exactly what I said, “the Roman Catholic Church stopped teaching mystical theology centuries ago”. Note, “stopped teaching” and not “stopped writing” or stopped having mystics. The books in your library are unlikely to be read by common believers because alas because no one teaches them in their local churches (at least for my eleven years of worshiping with Roman Catholics I have never witnessed such an occasion). Why not? – Because apparently, the Church stopped teaching mystical theology in seminaries so priests cannot teach the congregation:
“Before the condemnation of Quietism, Mystical Theology was taught in all Catholic seminaries, but only a matter of decades afterwards it was no longer universally taught.”
https://catholicstand.com/knowledge-alone-is-not-enough/
Not sure if you understood the Orthodox folks correctly. Usually, they say that Catholic mysticism is deeply flawed and to be avoided altogether. An Orthodox who is trying to preach Catholic mysticism to the Catholics is a rarity.
To Anna,
“…the Roman Catholic Church seems to get some strange hybrid of Mass with Zen/yoga/transcendental meditation/whatever.”
What is this? Where is a Mass like this found?
You are not the only one who found Christ in St. John of the Cross. So why do you think some Carmelites practice meditation? Do you presume that they never found Christ in St. John of the Cross? Or that their Order failed to teach him?
Finally, this contradictory statement begs explanation: “In my opinion all this ‘homages to the West’ happened only as a consequence of a loss of own mystical tradition. It is a mystical tradition that caused an elaborate Mass. Away with mysticism – away with such Mass, let us now do something simple that will fit out quazi-Eastern “mystical” practices.” !!!!!
I hope I misconstrue. But it seems as if you suggest that the Eastern Orthodox hold some bag of orthodoxy and perfection in liturgy and mystic tradition that the Roman Catholic Church does not. Is that what you are trying to say?
Re animus, anima, and spiritus, the author clarifies meanings in the paragraph beginning “The great Christian problem today…”
In another paragraph (earlier, I believe), he refers to the Oriental Early Church Father Origen; he apparently used the words anima and animus. Reddit and Latin Dictionaries show these words derive from early religious tradition in the Roman Empire. Augustine, in his work against the Gentiles, used spiritus, animus, anima, and mens.
I found no reference to Jung’s understanding and use of the words in Fr. Varden’s essay. Why bring him in to discussion?
To meiron
You wrote (September 12, 2024 at 7:17 am:)
“So why do you think some Carmelites practice meditation?”
Quite simply, “I think some Carmelites practice meditation” because, as I wrote in my comment which you are referring to: “I met some Carmelites who claimed they no longer pray to Jesus but do that meditation instead”. The rest of your arguments can be addressed in the same way.
I will leave here the link to my essay ‘The gnostic roots of centering prayer’ that analyses the adaptations of alien practices by the Church and their (negative) effect on an inner life.
http://orthodox-christian-icons.com/gnostic-roots-of-centering-prayer.html
Correction: Aquinas’ work Against the Gentiles, not Augustine’s.
One final correction, if I may: The author’s definitions of animus, anima, and spiritus appear in the paragraph beginning “The Cistercian Bernard…” The author attributes the “tripartite anthropology” to William of Saint Thierry.
Hope this helps.
Mr Olson, may I suggest an article on the 2003 Vatican document A Christian Reflection on the New Age, which directly rejects and condemns yoga. Please look it up. The author and all Catholics should read that and avoid yoga.
Thanks, Nathan. I’ve read the document several times, and it’s excellent. But Bp Varden is not advocating or promoting yoga. Quite the contrary.
I agree with your concerns about the spiritual aspects of yoga, but I’m not sure that it cannot be used simply as a set of physical exercises independent of anything spiritual. I took introductory yoga classes for a few weeks this summer for purely physical reasons. As a competitive athlete, I was looking for a way to improve my flexibility and strength, and I found it to be helpful. The body does seem to hold a lot of stress and tension. I did not experience any occultic influences or spiritual darkness during that time, however. Maybe our intentions are what is most important?
Intentions are important of course; when I began studying yoga, I only wanted to improve my health. Yet in a few months I had my occult experiences, one of them I related above. Perhaps because I have been engaged in occult before I am able to recognize its symptoms, including subtle.
When I asked my teacher if he is going to teach me hatha yoga he laughed and said that this nonsense is for the ignorant Westerners because there is only One Yoga. It is a spiritual discipline, originated in the quest of a spirit. I suspect how much one can be affected is determined by his personal sensitivity, whether he has been exposed to the occult before, who his teacher is, etc. But do you really want to take a risk?
Let us imagine some person who is very taken by the serenity and leanness of the Athonite monks. Imagine he decides to visit a monastery, stays there and does prostrations during the Liturgy non-stop, “for health reasons”. He says he does not want to become a Christian; he just wants to lose weight. It sounds absurd but it is not dissimilar from some person who decides to do yoga for the same reasons. A person who prostrates himself during the Liturgy with an intention not to participate in it but “just get fit” nevertheless will be affected spiritually.
The fact is that asanas have spiritual meaning; if one does them, he engages in a symbolic work even if he is unaware. It is of course up to an individual to decide whether to do it or not. The problem of the Western mindset is that it thinks it can extract what it needs from a spiritual discipline and use it without undesirable consequences. And the most important consequence, for a Christian, is a gradual loss of a relationship with Jesus Christ or a lack of sensitivity for Him. This is what I observe in those Roman Catholic writers who had mucked with yoga/occult/Zen/esoteric/whatever. Christ becomes secondary, they lose “a feel” for Him.
Thomas, it may well depend on which group was teaching you yoga. Some groups may be more sly and tricky than others and get people involved in eastern religious traditions. There is no universal yoga foundation. So do be careful next time.
It was taught at a gym, and there were no negative consequences. My relationship with Christ is as strong as ever. Sometimes stretching is just stretching, nothing more. It has no secret magical power.
Responding here to Anna’s Sept 11th post (alas, the structure of the comments section is clunky, or worse).
No, that is not exactly what you said. Not only are you moving the goalposts, you either ignore the points I make or you dismiss them with flippancy. A few quick points.
First, with all due respect, I doubt your singular experience somehow encompasses and can be applied to the entire experience and reality of the Catholic Church in the West over the past few centuries. I suggest you take care in making such broad statements, especially when there is plenty of basic evidence to the contrary.
Secondly, my point was that, yes, there certainly could be more done, overall, to emphasize and promote any number of important truths re: spirituality, theology, catechetics, etc. But that is entirely different from saying “the Roman Catholic Church stopped teaching mystical theology centuries ago”. That should be obvious.
Third: in fact, when my wife and I went through RCIA in a Roman rite parish in the mid 1990s, the instructor and the priest spent quite a bit of time on spirituality, prayer, and emphasis on union with Christ, all basics of mystical theology. And, of course, those truths are emphasized throughout the 1994 Catechism. So, to give just one of numerous possible examples:
Fourth: If these topics (prayer, contemplation, mystical union, etc.) were completely ignored, then why (again, to give just a single example) why were books of the writings of St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, etc., so popular in the 20th century? For instance, Image Books published hundreds of thousands of mass paperback copies of spiritual classics in the 1940s, 1950s, etc.
Fifth: As for seminaries (again, to give one example; there are plenty of others), one of the greatest Thomists of the 20th century, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange (1877-1964), who taught for decades in seminaries in Rome, was known for his extensive teachings of mystical theology. One of his most famous books is “The Three Ages of the Interior Life: Prelude of Eternal Life” (two volumes), which says the following near the start:
Sixth: “Not sure if you understood the Orthodox folks correctly.” I fear that your arrogance (whether due to anger or something else, I cannot assess) is both breathtaking and uncharitable. I’ve been in an Eastern Catholic parish for 25 years, I’ve read a lot of Eastern Christian theology (Schmemann is a personal favorite), I have friends who are Orthodox, my sister and her husband are Orthodox (she works for Tikhon Seminary/Monastery), I’ve given talks in Orthodox parishes, and I’ve given presentations at Catholic-Orthodox ecumenical conferences. To be clear, I’m not claiming to be an expert on Orthodoxy; but I do think I have a decent understanding.
Finally, you wrote: “Usually, they say that Catholic mysticism is deeply flawed and to be avoided altogether.” I’m very aware of this, even though many of my interactions with Orthodox have been very positive and edifying. What I’ve learned is that many Orthodox have a disdain for (and misunderstanding of) Catholicism that rivals the Fundamentalist Protestantism of my youth. Some even claim that the Roman Catholic Church has not taught mystical theology for centuries!
Dear Mr. Olson, Thank you for re-establishing the Church’s position on mystical theology. As a Carmelite, I am quite aware of the various currents of spirituality in the Church, and while some currents have been less emphasized during certain periods, that certainly does not mean that they have either disappeared, gone underground or been de-valued by the Church. It is true that in recent centuries, there has been a greater emphasis on apologetics and therefore on meditation because of the publications put forth by groups outside of the Church (such as Protestant and Enlightenment writers), but this simply means that the apophatic approach to spirituality was less emphasized, while the cataphatic approach was more visible. I find it incomprehensible that devotion to the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Medal should be considered to be “unmystical”!
Thank you again for your clear and detailed “defense” of mystical theology!
God made the body, a temple of the Holy Spirit, where God is meant to abide.
I think the article rambles while trying to weave a thread of something yet is unwilling to indicate the incompatibility of yoga and the non-comparison with Mass participation.
Yoga’s “hook” is “balance” and “self-control” and “oneness”, these are what should be addressed. A practiced disciplined distraction, habituated. Yoga also is a portal or threshold of occult.
Corporal mortification has its place among the Christian disciplines and vocations. Just using it isolated to highlight the “reasonableness” of yoga is very misleading.
Eric Fromm is an atheistic humanist with many core points not reconcilable with Christianity. Be careful. The root of shame and guilt is sin.
‘ ….. Fromm used the story of Adam and Eve as an allegorical explanation for human biological evolution and existential angst, asserting that when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, they became aware of themselves as being separate from nature while still being part of it. This is why they felt “naked” and “ashamed”: they had evolved into human beings, conscious of themselves, their own mortality, and their powerlessness before the forces of nature and society, and no longer united with the universe as they were in their instinctive, pre-human existence as animals. According to Fromm, the awareness of a disunited human existence is a source of guilt and shame, and the solution to this existential dichotomy is found in the development of one’s uniquely human powers of love and reason. ‘
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Fromm
Everything in the Garden of Eden was placed there by God, and are the things that are God’s. It is God’s garden. Adam and Eve took the things that are God’s without His permission. The serpent was promising autonomy from God. In eating of the forbidden fruit Adam and Eve lost Original Righteousness. They striped themselves of the robes of righteousness and all the graces that went with them. They stood denuded of grace, naked in their sin, spiritually dead. They were clothed in aprons and later loin cloths, because they were no longer clothed in the robes of righteousness. The loin cloths were used to cover their sinfulness. To me the loin cloths represents the stain of Original Sin on their souls. The stain of alienation from God, from each other, and the self-alienation from their former state of Original Righteousness. Original Sin left a lot of damage in its wake, the darkened intellect and weakened will.
*
The process of God creating the animals and Adam naming them in a cooperative process was where Adam discovered his place in God’s created order. An early form of proto-science, taxonomy. Original Sin disrupted this cooperative relationship between God and the human race. The Bible is a record of us walking away from God, thinking that we know better.
Maybe I SHOULD be cantankerous about the article not having been written with more directness. But I haven’t been cantankerous just observant.
I had said earlier that the destroyer of Pelagianism was Jerome. I can add in addition that so many mani-gnostic things of today were already dealt with by him in the example of the formation of the Bible as done under his care.
‘ We therefore should allow God to decide the way he wishes to have us participate in his love. But we can never, in any way, seek to place ourselves on the same level as the object of our contemplation, the free love of God; not even when, through the mercy of God the Father and the Holy Spirit sent into our hearts, we receive in Christ the gracious gift of a sensible reflection of that divine love and we feel drawn by the truth and beauty and goodness of the Lord. ‘
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19891015_meditazione-cristiana_en.html
We can get lost in ritual if its demands draw attentiveness away from the interior exterior transaction between priest and God. Take for granted that the TLM has external beauty and draws many to worship Christ via its structure. Certainly, there remains a true place for the TLM for reasons as expressed by Benedict XVI in his Apostolic letter Summorum Pontificum.
Similarly my hyperbole parroting Bishop Varden’s “suffocation” was …hyperbolic. Although raised as a young priest on the NO I’ve learned through the years to love the simplicity offering my private Masses in Latin, the exact Latin wording that was translated into English when Benedict XVI restored the Novus Ordo. Simplicity and theological correctness is more conducive to reach beyond to the object of our adoration.
Insofar as Bishop Varden’s Body Soul interest the less ritualistic, more simple, less body oriented liturgy is more conducive to the Catholic Christian tradition of contemplation.
I found the article a verbose intellectual meander seeming to endorse yoga, which practice is all about elemental forces and the manipulation thereof…no true spiritual insights, a good read for the academic, but lacking otherwise.
There are also good points to essentially godless Zen…but I can adopt good breathing and posture without seeming to endorse Zen.
As John the Beloved so concisely stated, God is love, and as the Christ and Moses observed, we must return that love with all that we are, including the body, where all manner of things come to mind in furthering that love…all to bring us to constant mindfulness of what we were made to do, to love, know, and then serve God.
I found the dig at the ancient rite to be nonsensical, as if practiced with attention and love with every gesture, movement, and word, it can be and has been a marvelous thing for spiritual enrichment, and the writer fails to chastise wandering minds and short attention spans.
“I found the article a verbose intellectual meander seeming to endorse yoga…”
Sigh. Again: he doesn’t endorse yoga. Good grief. And it’s not meandering.
“… the writer fails to chastise wandering minds and short attention spans.”
Ah. Now I get it: the author isn’t damning and condemning this, that, and the other thing, so it’s not a good piece. That says far more about you than it does the good bishop.
I did not ask that he condemn anything past wandering minds “celebrating” mass, rather than taking a poke at a particular rite.
And I was careful to say “seemingly”, twice, as it was clear from comments already that many took it as bordering upon endorsement, where it clear the author wandered the halls of mentioning assorted famous and obscure (in the USA, in any case) practitioners of assorted practices, rather than clearly stating where he stood on the issue.
I would thank you for not labeling me some manner of person looking for a torch and a stake, when I was nothing but bored to near near eyes glazing over by the time I waded to the end of all the name dropping. I have a very good idea of where Eastern mysticism falls short of Christian mysticism, as well as its good points, and need no torch or stake. The main points of differnce being the universal principle is Love creating and upholding everything, and this Love able to aid in leaving behind self through returned love, as opposed to some amorphous Mind or Void, and with ego seeking to do away with ego by own power.
As for your gratuitous insult at the end, turn about being fair play, what does your insult say about you? All I was guilty of was commenting in a COMMENT section that I found the article tedius and uninformative, and lacking a clear position on yoga or anything else. I hardly see where that warranted a shot from you past your being offended others not so keen on the piece as obviously you were as editor. As far an I am concerned you owe far more than silence.
Carl,
I applaud CWR’s effort to bring new ideas to its audience. However, it seems the culture is so far gone that any drop in the bucket drowns many. Or too many of us Catholics have habituated to rage and sophistry without reason, no matter the message. As someone who loves both language and the Catholic intellectual-tradition, I’m cut by a new sharp edge of sad.
From The Liber Christo Method: A Field Manual for Spiritual Combat (page 185 of 783 of the Apple eBook)
“Some have tried to Christianize Eastern prayer. In the attempt to “fuse Christian meditation with that which is non-Christian,” however, there exists a “danger of falling into syncretism” as found in Yoga and other Eastern meditative practices.[128] As I wrote, “‘yoga’ is derived from the Latin iugo, meaning to unite or to yoke, as seen the English word conjugal (which literally means to be bound or yoked together). In a Hindu context, ‘yoga’ means union with the absolute or some form of divinity. As the best-known practice of Hindu spirituality, yoga is incompatible with Catholicism. In fact, the physical poses of yoga invoke (false) Hindu gods.”[129]
The body positions in yoga cannot be separated from the incantations any more than the sign of the cross from its Christian context. Thus, “the body-soul invocations of yoga grant permissions to the demon and can expose the soul to deep affliction.”[130] In so doing, the above discussion on “interactive diabolic activity” applies, as the body positions and incantations are spiritual permissions given to the demons of yoga. Thus, the CDF asserts that “such erroneous forms, having reappeared in history from time to time on the fringes of the Church’s prayer, seem once more to impress many Christians, appealing to them as a kind of remedy, be it psychological or spiritual, or as a quick way of finding God.”[131]
“the body-soul invocations of yoga grant permissions to the demon and can expose the soul to deep affliction.”
This is my experience (and of others), and not just with yoga but with other “esoteric stuff” like theosophy etc. – and this is exactly what the Eastern Orthodox Church teaches. In fact, the Russian Orthodox Church decades ago even had to create “The Liturgy for rejoining to the Church those who practice the occult or used the services of the occultists” (we had a huge problem when atheism was dropped and people rushed for the occult). That means the Church does not allow such people to receive communion until they renounce their involvement. Of course, many were ignorant and would receive thinking they can practice “white magic” and be a Christian. However, if you speak to a regular Orthodox about those things they at least do not question the existence of the diabolical forces.
But what one does with a Westerner who does not really believe in such a reality? – Nothing really, the text like the one you quoted will likely cause him to think “this is nuts”. Ironically, then Western mystics were nuts as well – they speak of the evil assaults as a given reality. But almost no one reads mystics now.
Hence, I propose a purely psychological way to speak about the phenomena of Christians not seeing problems with yoga, Zen, etc. Christian mystical tradition teaches that we can do nothing to attain theosis. This is a vector of surrender, in love. It also teaches that God is the Person (Three Persons) so in the union with Him neither a Lover nor the Beloved lose their personhood. A Christian in the union with Christ retains his personhood fully. Yoga/Zen/Gnosis/occult teach that a disciple can obtain deification by himself, via engaging in various practices. The goal of yoga is to attain Samadhi, a loss of personhood, merging with an absolute. In other practices the impersonal goal is similar. The we have here the unreconcilable vectors:
Christianity – surrender to Christ, in love and theosis granted by Him, via a relationship with Him. The believer’s personhood is preserved and even blossoms towards the full potential (realized in Christ).
Yoga and other similar occult/gnostic disciplines – no such a surrender, self-attained theosis, no personal relationship with a deity and no goal of such a relationship.
To try to reconcile those opposing vectors causes a spiritual mess at the best, a loss of a relationship with Christ at the worst.
Finally, all this does not differ from Israel going after other Gods. They also did not drop their own God completely, they just engaged with other gods as well.
All well and good.
But where do you see or how do you read that the article endorses, advocates, approves, or otherwise suggests or encourages the practice of yoga?
I’m flummoxed at how many people are eager to engage in pugilistics with the author because of NOTHING which the author has said!
Some readers (myself included) seem to have had trouble reading the lengthy essay—the length of which extends, yes, beyond the typical CWR article. The author does not state the thesis until he shares what brought him to that thesis. The thesis statement does not occur in the first few pages. One must seek, wait,
read, and journey patiently. I do not want to take away the impression that CWR readers do not have patience to give an author the courtesy of letting him reveal himself by revealing a backstory first. Is the New Testament the only book we read in the Bible? Do Catholics ignore the Old Testament because its message is unrelated to the message in the New?
The author in no way, shape, or animated spiritus or animus form advocates for the practice of ‘Christian’ yoga. In fact, the author writes nothing APPROACHING that.
His thesis is: the decline of ascetic and liturgical ritual practices in the Western church has been synchronous with an uptick in the popularity of seekers of a ‘spiritual’ life through body-mind movements and practices OUTSIDE the Western church.
Charles, Yes but the long and short of it is: Stay away from all yoga, eastern meditation, etc. You can not know what trap you may be walking into.
There is a lot to reflect on here, but I’ll just relate my own experience. When I converted, I sought out primary classic Catholic books recommended to me including books like, Abandonment to Divine Providence, and the Cloud of Unknowing. Their concepts on deeply submissive prayer were difficult for me. My informal prayer has always been more on the order of man to man type dialogue with God, not without humbly realizing that God is God, but this is the tone of my statements to God.
For physical health, I’ve lifted weights all my life, and at 75, I’m still much stronger than the average 25-year-old. But in the gym 3 years ago, I had a major case of vertigo and felt certain it was the end with my heart giving out. Several people gathered around as I used enough common sense to lie on the floor. They helped me to recover, including a doctor who happened to be there and who explained that it was vertigo.
So I later went to my neurologist and had a workup which included one test in a darkened room which was much like a biofeedback exercise where I could hear my brainwaves. It was the most relaxing experience of my life while conscience, and it prompted me to investigate brain wave feedback sessions. They tell you not to try to direct the experience, but I did. They were very prayerful. They don’t replace the intensity of the conversation with Jesus I have with the Eucharist, but I very much felt the presence of God when I had these few sessions. There was no ego involved. I even had appropriate thoughts of sorrow and repentance. I did not make a habit of the exercises having only gone three times, but I’m glad I had the experience.
As a physicist, I am a believer that the energy that sustains the universe, in all of its forms within contained balancing forces, is sourced entirely in the mind of God, and this includes the electrochemical pulsations that our own brains provide in recognition and celebration of this truth.
I meant to say while conscious, not conscience regarding my first experience with biofeedback.
Meiron, in Michigan Fr. Robert Karle S.J. is freely mixing yoga into his spiritual exercises and doing it in chapels. In the past 2 weeks or so one of the Catholic online magazines ran the latest story of it; however, that article appears to have been retracted from internet. Was that what prompted this essay at CWR?
You can read up on Karle’s doings and those who are endorsing him. There is an organized “Ignation” ethos and body developing with it.
In my opinion reading this essay on its face, the yoga discussion trails off, true; yet some points that should have been revealed, arising from that very discussion, are not taken up as should be:
1. the undoing of monastic /cloistered life (in Europe!)
2. the inherent negation of spirituality that is yoga
3. the non-witness /anti-witness of yoga
4. the expanding energy to spread and multiply this falsehood.
Bishop Varden might be your good orthodox theologian or your brooding revolutionary, either way I offer my perspective using a basic reading wits.
Another concern I have is if the present resurgent interest -or, publicity- is a prelude to “Christianized yoga practice” getting a positive endorsement from Pope Francis and being made synodally “authentic and universalized”. Is Fr. Varden avoiding the fray? Where I live this is already an entrenched syndrome going strong 20+ years.
‘ But who will ever be able to get people to accept this mystery of the Cross that so repels the horror of suffering which is so natural to mankind? …..
They look at religion too much from the point of view of philosophy, sociology or even of aesthetics.They see in it only those elements which appeal to the mind and excite the sensibilities and imagination. They give free scope to their inclination to regard religion as a sublime school of poetry and of incomparable art. While it is true that religion possesses these qualities, to see it only from these secondary qualities subjects the economy of the Gospel to grievous distortion, making an end of what can only be the means. For it is a species of sacrilege to take the Christ of Gethsemani, of the Pretorium, of Calvary, as mere good subject for a holy picture. ‘
The Soul of the Apostolate, Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard, O.C.S.O., Part 4, c. – Sinag-Tala 1974 Nihil/Imprimi/Imprima
Hi Elias,
I love Chautard’s book.
As to your comment about AI and “mivenys fud! mivenys fud!” for the rest of the AI ages? 🤣🤣🤣
And re Karle: His internet presence re ISY has apparently been fairly well scrubbed. I did find a copy of a Facebook or Twitter post by Jimminy Martin, laudating and praising his fellow brother for all his ISY work. So that offered all the evidence I need to stay away.
Best, M
Elias, Correction: I love Cardinal Suenens’ Theology of the Apostolate, not Dom Chautard. I think I once had a copy of Chautard’s book, but I couldn’t find it today when I went to read more. Instead, I took up Suenens’ book, and it was his words, embued with the oil of charism, which I remembered as redolent in the beauty, validity, and value of Incarnate Love.
I do not think Fr. Varden avoids any fray. Would we prefer he speak with wrath? What would that accomplish, considering our day and age and pope? With gentleness and love Fr. Varden speaks and writes. His website is worth a look, but don’t be shocked to read what he has written there on TC–it is not something I would have admired during the heat of the moment.
This book, is my good fortune once more, found at CWR. Thank you.
Good day
Please forgive any typos
I’d agree that Anna has used all or nothing language but I recall said David Tarkington saying almost the same exact thing and in one of recent articles details how the yoga fever swept in and the Dominican dusters who followed the charisma disappeared. He kept serving a different group and they still flourish he states.
Anna’s point is you allow the devil a door and keep it open then poisonous fruit will result. The loss of religious orders in the 60 and 80 I’ve read is a result of this let’s dabble in this. Open for debate. Ok. Old enough to have seen it
Next. Know a priest who is an exorcist in a diocese who sldo dabbled in the occult. In no uncertain terms, he calls yoga diabolical. Do did the famous one in Rome and ft Chad rippengrr. Of course, they are the minority of Catholics who believe and practice this in their lives. Most seem to be no way it is diabolical and bad.
What goes into your mind gets you either closer to heaven or hell. The cataclysmic loss of religious adherents attests to mivenys fud not make the church more spiritual. On the contrary it contributed to its dismal place in our current church communities.
I think someone linked to an article of David Tarkington. He writes about catholic mysticism and its absence in todays church and in the last couple of centuries.
Thanks
From what I’ve read of Tarkington, which is not too much, it’s quite vague and broad-brushed. This is not to say that some of his points contain truth, but I’m leery of 800 word essays that try to summarize centuries of thought, activity, and reality. Not possible.
Thank you Ron,
You saved me from a need to respond elsewhere. Indeed, my language is “all or nothing” because I speak about a purely spiritual reality, essentially about two vectors, towards Christ and away from Him. There are no neutral forces in the realm of spirit and this is why one must speak broadly. This is probably why prophet Elijah did not say “generally speaking you are OK people of Israel but some of you diverted a bit and some a lot and some completely” – while in fact people in Israel were just like that. Instead, he said “choose now who you are to follow, God of Israel or Baal”.
Not convincing, Anna, at least not in response to my points. Your broad-brushed accusations are both unconvincing and uncharitable.
As for your points.
I see the text of Bishop Erik Varden as a carte blanche for an engagement incompatible with Christianity esoteric and explained why. You insist that it is not.
Likewise, I see the neglect of mystical teaching in the Roman Catholic Church. You do not. My opinion is informed not just by my observations but also on the published opinions of the Roman Catholics, including scholars. In fact, I provided the link to such an opinion, of the scholar David Tarkington, that the Roman Catholic Church stopped teaching mystical theology. I have no reason to distrust him, especially because it provides a plausible explanation for a troublesome phenomenon which I have observed in the Church. It makes sense: mystical theology stopped being universally taught hence priests are formed differently and unable to aid their congregations. No mystical theology – no need to speak about that aspect in the lives of saints, no example for inner life and so on.
Responding to someone else, you made a comment which suggested that the work of Tarkington is problematic and thus implicitly undermined his opinion, the neglect of the mystical theology – the opinion which happened to be mine as well. Besides Tarkington, there are piling lamentations of the Roman Catholics about the loss of “the mystical”, of the reverence which is a manifestation of the understanding of the mystical. A priest who makes a show of himself during Mass signifies that lack of such an understanding = the neglect of the mystical = of God’s presence. A chatting congregation signifies the same lack of the awareness of the mystical. It is a common thing to hear that nowadays the supernatural is widely ignored. The whole liturgical crisis about which Pope Benedict XVI wrote was caused by that loss. Hence, there is a huge vector here, of the loss of the mystical which shows itself in all areas of the life of the Church.
Unfortunately, your points do not change the reality and magnitude of that vector which is being observed by many and about which I spoke. ‘Three Ages of the Interior Life’ is good of course but it does not cancel the widespread situation of a neglect of the mystical and, as a result of it, of a tolerance of questionable practices. It is precisely the neglect of the mystical (in all forms) that opens the door to the alien “esoteric” practices. When you lose your own mysticism, you need to fill up the vacuum with something else or at least to be open to that “something” – and this is what we see in the text of the Bishop.
PS I had no intention of offending you re: your possible misunderstanding of the Orthodox folks. What I meant was that an Orthodox opinion about the Roman Catholic mystics (especially bridal mysticism) is typically far worse from what you said (definitely worse than the palamists’ “an absence of mystical altogether because of no doctrine about uncreated energies”). My statement was ironical and the irony was not re: you but re: the situation, including the irony of the Eastern Orthodox defending the Roman Catholic mysticism – to the Catholics.
What has emerged, unfortunately, is that you have reached a conclusion (partially summed up in the belief that the Western Catholic Church no longer teaches or ascribes to mystical theology) and are eager now to find an argument and some evidence for that conclusion. And that, in my estimation, has badly skewed your reading of Bishop Varden’s essay and has led you to dismiss any and all evidence to the contrary. (I’ll note here that I have read four of Bp Varden’s books, and that your understanding of his perspective is wildly off base.) Put another way, you insist on looking at a vast and complex historical and theological vista, which extends over centuries and cultures and countries, and distilling it down to a black-and-white caricature. That it certainly convenient, but it is not convincing in the least.
And, again, you continue to move the goalposts, changing the parameters that you originally set.
So, you write: “Likewise, I see the neglect of mystical teaching in the Roman Catholic Church. You do not.”
That is false, on both counts. You insisted that the Roman Catholic Church has not—AT ALL—taught mystical theology for hundreds of years. I showed just how ludicrous and uncharitable that claim is. And, secondly, I acknowledged that the Church in the West, in various ways (and for a multitude of intertwined reasons), has not always emphasized theosis, interior union with Christ, etc. Which is one reason that I co-edited a volume dedicated to showing how theosis/deification/mystical union is and must be an essential quality in Catholic teaching, life, practice, and worship. But, of course, you completely ignored that.
So, I have to conclude, sadly, that you are not interested in truth but in promoting a reading/understanding of matters that is false and uncharitable in nature.
I greatly enjoy Bishop Varden’s writings, CWR and the comments of Anna. And I am blessed like Carl to be a Catholic who has studied, taught and asked God in prayer for theosis/deification/mystical union. In the Church, many of us have been further blessed to encounter others in community who embrace the spiritual patrimony of the Faith as taught by the Fathers, Doctors and Catechism. Perhaps we outnumber the 1,500 remaining Mohicans, but I doubt it.
Look beyond the spiritually neglected faithful in the pews and into the rarified air of our Seminaries. It is rare even in Seminaries to find one solid course on theosis/deification/mystical theology.
Anna is spot on. We are a spiritual dark ages, leaving us vulnerable to any false light, drawing us away from the Light of Christ.
Anna, what you say can also be applied to those who use Ouija boards for entertainment. They have the potential to suck you into the occult in addition to being entertaining..
Yes, it is all the same, the force is one.
Fr Basil Cole (Dominican professor of theology) also relates that people often regard this device as an innocent aid to extract something out of the realm of the unconscious. In reality though there is a danger of the diabolical forces influencing that process. One may ask why it is necessarily diabolical and not good – because good spirits cannot be manipulated by human efforts. One can’t “extract the answers” from the angels, saints and God via some magical manipulation.
Actually, what exactly the person uses – Tarot cards, crystals, Ouija boards, pendulums or whatever – is not so relevant. (So-called “white witches” or “Orthodox healers” receive people in the rooms full of icons and “pray” there but they treat them and angels and saints as tools to achieve some “magical” result which is a stench before God.) It is the intent, to extract some hidden knowledge or ability, that counts. And it is prohibited by God, for a very good reason, to protect a human being and to direct him towards a communion with Himself.
Deacon, what you say can also apply to ‘Dungeon’ RPG games. The Black Citadel website talks about an OOZE.
“If you’re exploring a dungeon and spot any of the following signs, you may be about to have a close encounter of the Ooze kind.
“Oozes hoover up just about any matter that crosses their path as long as it’s not nailed down…If you find yourself walking down a suspiciously clean hallway, a gleaming white pile of bones, or realize it’s been over an hour since you saw your last rat, you may want to watch out for Oozes.
“…Oozes…leave behind…a trail of gelatinous slime….
“…a Gelatinous Cube can still be completely invisible to the naked eye….If you see a skeleton slowly ‘levitating’ down the passage towards you, surrounding by a halo of shiny gold coins, take my advice: go the other way.”
I’m going to apply this knowledge and leave this combox! At my next Mass, I’ll cross myself 52 times and sprinkle holy water on my veil, prayer book, and pew. I’ll have Mass said for any OOZE which still looks to harm and perform more acts of uncharity.
BTW: Are sacraments considered elements of mystical theology? Does the Roman Catholic Church not teach and has She not taught them since Her foundation with Peter given the keys to proclaim and administer them?
Anna schmoozed this to us here …”the Roman Catholic Church stopped teaching mystical theology centuries ago”.
VCII defines the church as a sacrament and the Mystical Body of Christ, and here we have a schmooze saying the church doesn’t teach about that.
This statement – God loves me the way he made me – is used today to justify the LGBTQ+ behavior…..
“God loves me the way he made me.” Ah, but do I know what is the way He made me? Or do I imagine myself to be something that is not the way He made me.
Of course, God loves me the way he made me. He loves His own handiwork and He loves the fulfillment of His handiwork if I let Him bring His handiwork to that fulfillment.
Adam and Eve were not created in a state of Original Sin, but that of Original Righteousness. Many people leave out the effects of Original Sin, the darkened intellect, weakened will, and disordered desires, that survive baptism.
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As you are undoubtedly aware St. John of the Cross wrote a book about divine union titled “The Ascent of Mount Carmel.” To me the Fall of Man could be called the fall from off of Mount Carmel. In the Fall of Man section there were references made to the eye and Adam and Eve’s eyes. The eye is talked about in Matthew 6:22-23:
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“The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light; but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be in darkness. And if the light in you is darkness, how great will the darkness be”. (NABRE)
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When Adam and Eve’s eyes were opened they were no longer illuminated by the light of God’s graces. Through Original Sin Adam and Eve had stripped themselves of the robes of righteousness, leaving them truly naked, denuded of grace, spiritually dead. Their now bad eyes leading to a darkened intellect, a weakened will, and disordered desires. There is a positive form of spiritual nakedness where one seeks to be stripped of the bad eye and all the encrustations of sin and worldly attachments that can separate us from God and the reception of His pure light of grace through divine union.
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The Bible and historic Church teachings are an excellent spiritual eye exam to test the soundness of our spiritual vision. Too many in the Church look like they have given themselves an exemption from Original Sin, sin in general, and temptation.
And I would not have used “yogic” or yoga or any of its aspects as a standard of comparison to “help redeem” certain “labeling” of “conservative traditionalism” or to “understand its postures” in order to make it “more acceptable”.
Search through the article with the word “yogic” and see how the thread got wove.
Question to Ron: Your “mivenys fud”, is a typo? They keep boasting how super-human AI is and how much it will exceed humanity, unimaginably, “by the end of the Century”, etc. They always mean it in an absolutely positive sense; but then, surely, AI could exceed everything in the negative, just as well.
Imagine you uploaded your consciousness into AI one fine sunny day because they told you it’s no different than having an outing at the beach, go have fun. Only to find out that they enrolled you permanently in a yogic program where you get to hum “mivenys fud! mivenys fud!” for the rest of the AI ages. You’re looking around as you’re not supposed to and the next program is grinning at you, as he repeats over and over in a yoga posture of a description, “It’s just a typo! Focus!”
Bishop Erik Varden, OCSO, is an exceptional intellect, a fresh thinker. But our fallen minds are no match for supernatural evil. He states: “It is not my purpose to engage in polemics.” Perhaps he succeeded in his conclusions about the Mass, but he failed when musing about our bodies, prayer and yoga.
A Bishop should never say: “A detour via yoga.” Flirting with the occult is never a detour. Yoga is a black hole. Yoga is not just another form of exercise, it is a gateway drug to the New Age.