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The religious life of many believers is summed up in “religious practices”: to assist at services, “to do his Easter duty”, to fulfill his religious duties, without forgetting his philanthropic activities. Such a life is well filled, practical in many respects, and yet it risks having no connection with the spiritual life properly so-called. Even more, the common sense of the upright believer, set up as a reasonable system, can be like a formidable suit of armor through which can pass no folly, not even a miracle, or anything that could contrast with a man of the 20th century. Could he even catch the hidden irony in Pascal's wager instead of keeping a tranquil assurance from “supposing that...” ?
Moreover, persons exist who have an interior life that is very rich but not religious. Thinkers, artists, theosophists also, live an intense and profound psychic life, able to go as far as cosmic mysticism or spiritualism without God.
Therefore one can observe that of these two forms of life, “religious” and “interior”, the first always entails a relation of dependence on a transcendent and personal absolute, and the second is autonomous and goes deep into the immanence of its own psychic richness.
The spiritual life alone integrates these two dimensions and shows them to be complementary. Essentially interior, it is also the life of man facing his God, participating in the life of God, the spirit of man listening for the Spirit of God.
Considered on the vaster plane of world religions, the spiritual life represents the Christian synthesis between the anthropocentric inwardness of the Oriental religions without God, and the transcendent and theocentric personalism of the biblical religions, Judaism and Mohammedanism. In combining the marvelous penetration of Hinduism into the abyss of human inwardness with the sacred fear of Jewish and Mohammaedan monotheism before the absolute transcendence of the creator, the Christian, nevertheless, creates an entirely new element. `The divine I has spoken to a human thou. His word has established the one who listens to him, has rendered him existing in his image, and he continues to create and fill him by keeping him in living communion with the Word made flesh.
The new tone of the Gospel is overwhelming. The God of the Christians is most strange. He does not in any way resemble human ideas concerning God, and this unheard of characteristic determines the spiritual life. The creator of the world, in order to create it, made himself “the lamb immolated since the beginning”. And on the cross, God took the part of man against his own deity. For man's benefit, God is no longer all-powerful; he dies to himself that man may live. He transcends his intra-divine silence toward another thee, and introduces him into his mystery, into the sacred circle of the trinitarian communion.
Since then man can say with St. Augustine: “You were at the same time more inward than my inmost self and loftier than the highest of myself.”3.1
God desired to become man, and it is the incarnation that structures the divine and human nature of all spiritual life. In living it, man is never alone; he lives it with God and God lives it in man and with man. This participation of God in the human is decisive. The spiritual life does not come from below, from human fabrication, from man's desires or from the longings of his soul. Man does not invent it for his consolation. Such a romantic mythology would never resist the trials of time and of death. The spiritual life comes from above. God inaugurates it by the gift of his presence. Man receives this revelation-event and answers by his act of faith. He formulates and confesses the Creed, the saying of the Father's thou with his Son and his Spirit. A liturgical dialogue, productive of unity, is begun.
The spiritual life is an event in the interior of the spirit. Seen from the outside, it easily lends itself to misunderstandings and to frequent confusion with psychism. Thus psychologism formulates this classic question, which is beside the point, namely: “Does there exist a correspondence between the subjectivity of religious experience and the objectivity of its object?”
Thus propounded, the question prejudges its simplistic solution: the object of the experience--God--is only an aspect immanent in the soul, esse in anima. Man enters into dialogue with the elements of his own psyche, romanticizes them and makes them a mythology.
The error is to introduce a speculative distance between the experience and its object; religious experience is at once the manifestation of its object.
It is not a question of conformity between the experience and the spiritual reality, for the experience is this reality. The experience of the saints and mystics is the coming of the Spirit. The idea of God is not anthropomorphic. Man does not create God according to his own image; he does not invent him. However, the idea of man is theomorphic; God has created him in his image. Everything comes from God. The experience of God also comes from God because God is closer to man than man is to himself. As soon as God manifests his presence, man sees it. That is why nothing can be proved one way or another, but one who denies the reality of experience can at the most only prove that he has not lived it. The person of Christ is the place where once for all the experience of man by God and that of God by man have converged. It is this Christie reality that precedes every religious experience and actualizes it in Christ: “You are in me and I am in you.” This reality interiorizes religious experience even to the point of divine intimacy.
One could almost say that the nuptial possession of man by God attains a kind of reciprocal substitution. The Holy Spirit utters in us and with us, as a single being: “Abba, Father.” At his crucifixion Al Hallaj said: “I am the one whom I love and the one whom I love has become me.”3.2 “It is no longer I that live but Christ lives in me,” St. Paul declared. Master Eckhart and Symeon the New Theologian describe in an identical manner this nuptial and eucharistic transmutation: “Thou becomest, a single spirit with me, without confusion, without alteration.”3.3
God cannot be made an object; consequently he is radically interior. “God is the more invisible the more his burning intimacy radiates in man's spirit.” The spiritual life and religious experience are likewise incapable of being made objects. The very artificial psychological question, nevertheless, disturbs man and arouses a useless battle of words which is not fought on the level of evidence. It takes place on the exterior. Bergsonian intuitivism, in accordance with Oriental philosophy, permits us to affirm that every thought rendered too adequate to its verbal expression loses something of its dimension of depth. This is also the profound experience of L. Lavelle who wrote: “The word takes from the thought its purity and its secret”; on the other hand: “Silence does not differ at all from the inward word.”3.4 The more this interior thought-word matures in its silent depths the more it becomes inexpressible, ineffable. It is transformed into evidence that is all the more unprovable as it is irrefutable. The final logic of all revelation is evidence. The God of the Bible is before all else self-evident.
Another error is shown by syncretism. A psychologist easily crosses the frontiers of the various confessions, and he supposes that all religions converge. Nothing is comparable, however, to the truth of the Gospel offered and lived in the eucharist. It bears in Christ the accomplishment of the aspirations not only of men and angels, but of the three divine Persons, for according to Nicolas Cabasilas, the incarnation is the “pouring of God outside himself”.