Many years ago, a youngish academic asked me with some puzzlement what you were supposed to do if you converted to Christianity. He was not hostile to the ideas and doctrines; indeed, he found they made a fair amount of sense to him. But what exactly was the difference it was supposed to make? Yes, obviously, you were meant to become a better person; but was there any set of trustworthy practices for exploring, monitoring and deepening your awareness of who you were in the presence of infinite love, any way of learning to see yourself and your motivations or compulsions more clearly?
There are two sorts of impatient response to this kind of question. Some might say that Christianity is not analysis or therapy. As the Lord says to the rich young man, you know the Commandments: just get on with it. Others would point to various traditions of formation, to the liturgy, the disciplines of mental prayer and spiritual direction; what more is needed?
I think my academic colleague would have said that he knew quite well that Christianity wasn’t psychotherapy and also that there were plenty of Christians who were familiar with meditative prayer. But as someone hanging around by the door of the Church, so to speak, he needed to be told something along these lines. “This is the kind of being you are as a human; these are the levels and dimensions in which your life is lived, in ways you probably won’t be aware of a lot of the time. Here are some pitfalls that your imagination will need to learn about. This is the sort of challenge and transformation that trust in Christ is likely to open up for you, and this is how you can guard against losing the plot. And – not least – this is how your entire life, bodily as much as mental, can come to be fully immersed in all this.” Advice would follow on breathing, bowing, sitting, standing, eating, fasting… As my acquaintance said, if you were exploring becoming a Buddhist, this would be the sort of advice you’d get. He was anxious that the invitation to Christian faith was too much about what was going on in your conscious mind, and not enough about how an entire psycho-physical reality could be adjusted to a radically strange but also more deeply “natural” rhythm.
I think he was broadly right in seeing most modern varieties of Christianity as having bought into a rather diminished understanding of Christian identity. The first Christians spoke of a new creation and of a disconcertingly radical new awareness of belonging with one another and with the world around them – a level of connection both with other people and their needs and with the deepest structures and “harmonics” of material creation. If they were insistent about sitting light to material comfort and satisfactions, and about questioning their immediate accounts of what they thought they wanted or needed, this was because they were not content to stay on the surface of things. They were aware that they had mysteriously been gifted a connection with the eternal creative Word, a connection that reorientated their awareness and made it possible to believe that their failures could be forgiven and their egotistical destructiveness could be worn away. In their common worship at the Eucharist, they believed that they were receiving a “medicine of immortality”, something that halted the slide towards isolation and death that had prevailed before.
The late medieval and Renaissance thought-world had not only inflated the significance of solitary individual consciousness, but had also thinned out the sense of connection with or alignment to the rest of creation. Both Reformation and Counter-Reformation often got stuck with a problem over the apparent gulf between internal and external worlds, becoming (understandably enough and brilliantly enough) fascinated with the insides of the human spirit and with new ways of harnessing the material world for human profit. But the price was high. And that is one reason why many look to the traditional wisdom of Eastern Christianity for help in answering the sort of question we began with. Eastern Christianity, especially in the Greek and Syrian world between AD 400 and 800, developed a very full picture of how the human psyche worked and what disciplines of body as well as mind could support and enrich Christian commitment.
The little book on Passions of the Soul which I’ve just published is an attempt to give a very basic
introduction to this tradition. It’s not about esoteric “mystical” techniques; but it is about what kind of self-awareness and attention to one’s material body can help anchor one in the divine love and wisdom that Christ’s Spirit makes natural to us. To put it a bit provocatively, it is about learning how to live in heaven by learning how to live on earth, in the body, in the moment.
It has plenty of echoes in the West – in Julian of Norwich or the Carmelite Brother Lawrence, for instance – but offers a fuller picture of the intricate workings of the self-obsessed ego and how to cut through them to a new level of simplicity. I hope it just might open a door or two for people asking questions like the one my colleague raised all those years ago.
Dr Rowan Williams is a former Archbishop of Canterbury. Passions of the Soul is published by Bloomsbury Continuum, £11.99.
This article first appeared in the February 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our multiple-award-winning magazine and have it delivered to your door anywhere in the world, go here.
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