Written for the Licentiate in Sacred Theology (S.T.L.).
Introduction
Spiritual direction is an ancient expression of the Church’s pastoral ministry that is currently experiencing a new springtime of interest and expertise. As an art, spiritual direction is offered and received in a variety of ways. In our day we are seeing a proliferation of spiritual direction formation programs and a significant increase in the number of people giving and receiving spiritual direction. Together with that there are misunderstandings about what spiritual direction ought to be that can limit its effectiveness. Some of these misunderstandings originate in the areas of anthropology and spiritual theology that are closely related to the questions St. John Henry Newman responded to with his writings and preaching. In this paper we will see how some aspects of the conceptual framework and the personal example of St. John Henry Newman can provide important insights for understanding and improving the practice of spiritual direction.
We address three main areas of difficulty in spiritual direction in this paper. We first address the proper context of spiritual direction which is a personal relationship. We find validation for this in Newman’s teachings by considering the importance he places on the personal influence that is necessary for the real apprehension and assent that leads to growth and conversion. Secondly, Newman’s teaching on conscience helps us to understand the proper content of the directee’s sharing and the particular focus of spiritual direction. Finally, we can understand the various modes of communication with which the spiritual director responds to the directee by appealing to Newman’s concepts of notional and real apprehension.
To be clear, this paper is not addressing Newman’s own experience of giving or receiving spiritual direction. He never fashioned himself as a spiritual director even though he provided spiritual advice for many people, especially through his letters. Likewise, it is not clear that any particular individual played the role of spiritual director in Newman’s life, although he had many close friends, confidants and spiritual advisers who were critical for helping him at various points along his journey. At the same time, we can still point to Newman’s personal example to highlight some of his values and the way that he lived out the concepts he taught.
What is Spiritual Direction?
Spiritual direction developed in the ancient Church with the desert fathers and the wisdom they provided to those who wished to seek Christ more deeply. We most often encounter these ancient spiritual masters today through their pithy sayings on the spiritual life. A superficial view of spiritual direction can develop from this reduction as it gives the misconception that spiritual direction is provided by gurus or oracles who offer clever answers and mystical directives to those who seek their advice. A similar misconception can be caused by the expression “spiritual direction” as it gives the impression that spiritual directors are supposed to direct the lives of their directees. These views place a heavy emphasis on the supremacy of the director and the importance of his words of guidance to the directee. This underestimates the importance of the relationship between the spiritual director and the spiritual directee.
To the contrary, the relationship between the spiritual director and the directee is paramount. It is a particular kind of relationship and has some unique qualities, but it is a genuine personal relationship in which the spiritual directee’s relationship with God is able to develop and grow. For this reason we have defined spiritual direction as: “a one-on-one relationship between a director and a directee in which the directee’s relationship with God is the fundamental reference point.”
From this definition we can glean three points that we will explore in this paper. First we see the importance of a relationship as the context in which spiritual direction unfolds. Examining the writings and example of St. John Henry Newman will teach us the nature and value of relationships for growing in faith. Second we can determine the content of the spiritual direction, namely it is in reference to the directee’s relationship with God. Newman’s teaching on the conscience comes into play here as describing the most clear and intimate touch point in the directee’s relationship with God. Third we can understand the contribution that the director makes as he or she personally influences that relationship with God. At this point we can see how the director’s various modes of communication can be described in terms of assisting the directee with notional or real apprehension.
The Importance of a Relationship
The teaching and example of St. John Henry Newman help us to situate the importance of relationships when considering personal growth in the spiritual life. Ian Ker insists:
We could really argue from Newman’s works as a whole that he puts as much emphasis on the deep need of the person for relationship with other persons and on the impossibility, aside from the infinite Person of God, of the kind of self-fulfilment that human nature seems to crave, as he does on the implications of conscience.
In Newman’s own words we see how important he considered the personal influence of relationships to be in the spread of the Gospel. The propagation of Truth cannot be left to books, laws and institutions but must especially be carried out through relationships: “[The Truth] has been upheld in the world not as a system, not by books, not by argument, nor by temporal power, but by the personal influence of such men as have already been described, who are at once the teachers and the patterns of it…”
We can also consider the importance of relationships in Newman’s own spiritual journey. As we explore Newman’s writings, we see the constant and pervasive influence of relationships. Personal relationships motivated his voluminous writing, including his preaching, his essays, and his thousands of letters. His intellectual explorations were not a matter of working out abstract theories for the sake of esoteric knowledge, but rather he was always addressing questions and doubts that arose from a wide assortment of interlocutors. We can take a few examples to illustrate the point.
First, we can see in Newman’s pivotal conversion at age 15 the importance of a human mediator. He testified: “Above and beyond the conversations and sermons of the excellent man, long dead, who was the human means of this beginning of divine faith in me, was the effect of the books which he put into my hands, all of the school of Calvin.” He also mentioned the strong influence of Thomas Scott of Aston Sandford as “the writer who made a deeper impression on my mind than any other, and to whom (humanly speaking) I almost owe my soul….” Names such as Daniel, Whately, Butler, James, and many more stand out prominently in the autobiography of his early years and the dozens of others remain as companions and influential friends throughout the course of his life.
Newman also testifies to the importance of the real apprehension that comes through personal interactions:
The heart is commonly reached, not through reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion.
Further evidence can be drawn from Newman’s cardinalatial motto, namely “Heart speaks to heart.” He does not merely claim that the heart speaks, but it has both an origin and a destination. In other words, the heart speaks to another heart in the context of a relationship. We see this in Newman’s own example as it motivates essentially all of his work—his sermons, his letters and his essays are all inspired by ongoing dialogue with various individuals who played important roles in his life. One might say that his capacity to think deeply, even to access his conscience with clarity, is conditioned by relationships. In his introduction to Newman’s Grammar of Assent, Nicholas Lash commented:
…even this most theoretical and technical of Newman’s works was provoked and stimulated by personal considerations: by his love for a lifelong friend the fundamental currents of whose thinking had drifted ever further from his own, and whose seventeen-year-old son Newman (who was the boy’s godfather) had received into the Catholic Church on Christmas Eve 1859.
Although Newman did not consider himself to be a spiritual director, one could argue that he accepted that role in certain relationships which we can still observe through his letters. Indeed, from the evidence of those letters, he was exemplary in the way he entered into those relationships. He was patient, fostered freedom in those who sought his help and proposed without imposing:
For example, he realized that helping a person come to faith was a slow process, often involving many complex human factors. Much of Newman’s spiritual direction for people in the process of coming to faith dealt with various difficulties in the area of certitude.
Newman recognized the importance of personal relationships for fostering such certitude. Commenting on Newman’s opening quote for the Grammar of Assent from St. Ambrose of Milan: “It has not pleased God to save his people by dialectical reasoning,” Br. Reed Frey noted:
Newman did not think that abstract dialectical reasoning could touch the heart of the person, could penetrate the unfathomable depths of the person, and stimulate within him joy and consolation. Rather, it was the presence of a person, an encounter with a bearer of truth, that led to the strongest kind of conviction.
From these various examples, we can see the importance that Newman placed on relationships for developing the convictions necessary for growth in faith. Ian Ker notes that, “The individual Christian’s relation to God is inseparable from the communion of other Christians.” Seen another way, that relationship with God takes place particularly in the conscience and, while one’s conscience is something radically personal, it is also experienced in relationship with others, especially the Church, as the word itself “con – science,” implies.
At the same time, while relationships are important in general, the relationship with the spiritual director has some unique qualities. The relationship of the spiritual director and the spiritual directee becomes the context in which lasting growth takes place. For one thing, the spiritual director should be a representative of the Church and a witness to the Church’s conscience by always faithfully representing Magisterial teaching. Furthermore the directee’s relationship with his or her spiritual director is marked by a sharing of the directee’s interiority with the director. That interiority includes especially the matters of conscience that we will consider in the next section. In order to enter into these matters of conscience, the directee must have a deep trust in the director enough to become vulnerable and reveal the movements of the heart. This gives us a sense of the qualities that the spiritual direction relationship must develop in order to be most fruitful.
While Newman does not specifically consider the special qualities of the relationship of spiritual direction, he does recognize the importance of particular personal friendships for the sake of personal growth in Christian charity: “it is a characteristically Newmanian theme that our charity towards others is formed and influenced by our own particular personal friendships.” To validate this claim, Ker quotes several passages from Newman’s Sermon “Love of Relations and Friends” including: “the best preparation for loving the world at large, and loving it duly and wisely, is to cultivate an intimate friendship and affection towards those who are immediately about us.” This helps us to see how the directee’s capacity to open the heart, share the conscience and grow in trust and love with a spiritual director can be formative for the directee’s growth in virtue, prayer and living out the Christian life. We can understand why the Program for Priestly Formation would place this expectation of integration of the whole person on the Seminary spiritual director: “The spiritual director should foster an integration of spiritual formation, human formation, and character development consistent with priestly formation.”
Although there is often a misconception that the most important part of spiritual direction is the content of what is shared, that shared content necessarily takes place in a particular context, namely an intimate relationship marked by trust and love. We have seen how Newman recognized the importance of such relationships for the sake of growing in the Christian life.
The Role of Conscience
Spiritual direction as manifestation of conscience
Referring back to our definition of spiritual direction we repeat that spiritual direction takes place in a relationship that has the directee’s relationship with God as its primary point of reference. The directee’s relationship with God takes place in the most intimate center of his or her life through that organ known as the conscience. The conscience is that inner voice that is identified with the voice of God or, as Newman described it, “the aboriginal vicar of Christ.” Newman’s description of the conscience as being more than a merely moral interior guide helps us to clarify the content of spiritual direction. Spiritual direction is the realm of the full manifestation of conscience even beyond the sins that should be confessed in the Sacrament of Penance, though it would also include those.
Here we go back to the foundations of spiritual direction in the tradition of the Desert Fathers as witnessed by the Rule of Benedict which teaches: “The fifth step of humility is that a man does not conceal from his abbot any sinful thoughts entering his heart, or any wrongs committed in secret, but rather confesses them humbly.” This total self-disclosure even to the point of sinful thoughts is a hallmark of ancient monasticism and a model for spiritual direction.
Likewise, Pope St. John XXIII, who had been a Seminary spiritual director, in an address to Seminary spiritual directors explained that of all the seminary formators the most important role is theirs because of this work in a seminarian at the level of his conscience:
[T]he most important role is yours, for your action is carried on in the inner depths of consciences, where deep convictions take root and where the real transformation of the young man called to the priesthood takes place. The breath of the Spirit of the Lord initiates and sets a crown on this [transformation]. But in the ordinary course of events, it will be hard for the young man to know how to follow His inspirations without the expert guidance of the spiritual director.
What is the conscience according to Newman?
What does it mean that the action of spiritual direction is carried on in the inner depths of consciences? This is more than a matter of tuning a moral compass. Here, Newman’s great work on describing the conscience helps us understand the content and proper depth of the conversations that ought to take place in spiritual direction. That lifelong reflection in Newman began as early as his conversion in 1816. When Newman followed the inspiration of Thomas Scott and embraced a “bold unworldliness,” he was embracing a “conviction, at once instinctive and reasoned, that the only way of maintaining complete spiritual and intellectual independence in this unintelligible and deceptive world lies in uncompromising fidelity to the voice of conscience.” These are the convictions that are to be shared in spiritual direction. These are the instinctive and reasoned areas of the heart that are the proper matter for that absolutely confidential conversation with a spiritual director.
Walter Conn offers a helpful explanation of Newman’s teaching on conscience by expressing it across three dimensions of our human experience: desire, discernment and demand. In each case we can see that conscience includes a moral dimension, but is also not limited to that. In terms of desire, Conn references one of Newman’s Sermons in which he states: “There is a voice within us, which assures us there is something higher than earth,” and Newman goes on to explain the human yearning for the Almighty One. In describing the dimension of conscience as discernment Conn explains: “If conscience as desire is most radically a search for truth, and ultimately for God who is truth, conscience as discernment is a search for the truth of what should be done here and now in this particular concrete situation of value.” Conn gives evidence for this based on Newman’s Grammar of Assent and Letter to the Duke of Norfolk explaining that conscience in this regard is Aristotle’s phronesis, responsible for determining the goodness or badness of a particular act in a particular circumstance. Lastly, Conn elaborates on how conscience not only desires and guides but even demands or dictates that particular actions be taken. Here he quotes Newman’s Grammar of Assent: “thus the phenomena of Conscience, as a dictate, avail to impress the imagination with the picture of a Supreme Governor, a Judge, holy, just, powerful, all-seeing, retributive, and is the creative principle of religion, as the Moral Sense is the principle of ethics.”
In the sum of these dimensions we recognize the breadth of conscience and we recognize the manifestation of conscience as the proper content for spiritual direction. This corresponds nicely with the broadening understanding of conscience that we find in St. Ignatius of Loyola and has been elaborated by his highly regarded spiritual son, the venerable spiritual director, Fr. George Aschenbrenner, SJ. To illustrate this point, Aschenbrenner renames an examination of conscience as an examination of consciousness:
When examen is related to discernment, it becomes examen of consciousness rather than of conscience. Examen of conscience has narrow moralistic overtones. Its prime concern was with the good or bad actions we had done each day. Whereas in discernment the prime concern is not with the morality of good or bad actions; rather the concern is with the way God is affecting and moving us (often quite spontaneously!) deep in our own affective consciousness.
By remaining within Newman’s understanding of conscience, this shift in vocabulary from “conscience” to “consciousness” is unnecessary. What Fr. Aschenbrenner is aiming at here is the experience of God in the soul. In his work he could leverage the insight of St. Ignatius of Loyola regarding the experience of God speaking in the conscience which Ignatius described in terms of “spiritual consolation.” Without the same precision of describing the interior experience, Newman is pointing to the same reality, namely that God can speak in us and the conscience is the organ, or voice, through which He does that.
Newman called this the “essence of natural religion,” and he was aware that this “secret voice” is universally a part of the human experience:
Conscience implies a relation between the soul and a something exterior, and that, moreover, superior to itself; a relation to an excellence which it does not possess, and to a tribunal over which it has no power. And since the more closely this inward monitor is respected and followed, the clearer, the more exalted, and the more varied its dictates become, and the standard of excellence is ever outstripping, while it guides, our obedience, a moral conviction is thus at length obtained of the unapproachable nature as well as the supreme authority of That, whatever it is, which is the object of the mind’s contemplation.
Newman expressed this idea most beautifully in his novel Callista in the testimony that Callista herself offered to Polemo. Newman describes conscience here in a way that tenderly and honestly explicates the interpersonal dialogue with God that takes place in the depths of the soul through an obscure but real experience. While it is on the one hand so intimately a part of the person, at the same time it also belongs beyond the person. This is the mysterious depth that the person herself only partially understands and only the spirit of God who dwells in man fully understands (cf. Jer 17:9-10; 1 Cor 2:11). It is for this reason that it is the most important content to bring out in spiritual direction:
“Well,” she said, “I feel that God within my heart. I feel myself in His presence. He says to me, ‘Do this: don’t do that.’ You may tell me that this dictate is a mere law of my nature, as is to joy or to grieve. I cannot understand this. No, it is the echo of a person speaking to me. Nothing shall persuade me that it does not ultimately proceed from a person external to me. It carries with it its proof of its divine origin. My nature feels towards it as towards a person. When I obey it, I feel a satisfaction; when I disobey, a soreness—just like that which I feel in pleasing or offending some revered friend. So you see, Polemo, I believe in what is more than a mere ‘something.’ I believe in what is more real to me than sun, moon, stars, and the fair earth, and the voice of friends. You will say, Who is He? Has He ever told you anything about Himself? Alas! no!—the more’s the pity! But I will not give up what I have, because I have not more. An echo implies a voice; a voice a speaker. That speaker I love and I fear.”
Applying Newman’s understanding of conscience to spiritual direction
Applying these insights to spiritual direction we can see the importance of sharing this interior development with the spiritual director. The increasing excellence and moral conviction is strengthened through being shared in the spiritual direction relationship. As we will see in the next section, sharing it also opens it to guidance and further refinement from the spiritual director. This is the inner sanctuary of the person as expressed eloquently in the Second Vatican Council in a text which could have been written by Newman himself: “Conscience is the most secret core and sanctuary of a man. There he is alone with God, Whose voice echoes in his depths.”
To share this inner sanctuary is truly to share that personal center which makes a person a person. This requires tremendous trust to speak from one’s interiority with such vulnerability. That is precisely the trust that must develop throughout the spiritual direction relationship and it is the heart of fruitful spiritual direction.
While spiritual direction must develop a trust that can reach to the depths of the inner sanctuary where our life touches the life of God, this also expands out into the rest of our life. It is not only a matter of sharing rarified moments like Newman’s 1816 conversion experience. We also learn to see God in the rest of our lives, or to say it another way, we learn to live our whole lives in the sight of God. Sharing our experience with our spiritual director reinforces this because the connection between sharing with the spiritual director and sharing with God instinctively develops in the course of the relationship. As Newman said about biological parents but could also be applied even more to spiritual fatherhood or motherhood: “The love of God is not the same thing as the love of our parents, though parallel to it.” This parallel helps us to bring our lives steadily more into the conscious awareness of God’s Presence as we learn to self-disclose more radically in spiritual direction. That is the ultimate goal that Newman promotes in what he describes as unceasing prayer:
A man who is religious, is religious morning, noon, and night; his religion is a certain character, a mould in which his thoughts, words, and actions are cast, all forming parts of one and the same whole. He sees God in all things; every course of action he directs towards those spiritual objects which God has revealed to him; every occurrence of the day, every event, every person met with, all news which he hears, he measures by the standard of God’s will. And a person who does this may be said almost literally to pray without ceasing; for, knowing himself to be in God’s presence, he is continually led to address Him reverently, whom he sets always before him, in the inward language of prayer and praise, of humble confession and joyful trust.
This total self-disclosure in spiritual direction and the total transparency of living our lives knowingly in God’s Presence can only develop in so far as we are able to manifest our conscience and first see and then even give voice to that intimate conversation that God has with us in the very depths of our souls.
The Modes of Communication in Spiritual Direction
Having described the context of spiritual direction which is a relationship between a director and a directee, and then the content of that relationship which is the directee’s relationship with God at the level of conscience, now we come to the point of describing how the spiritual director is to communicate in response to the directee’s manifestation of conscience. We will see that there are two basic forms of spiritual direction that the spiritual director offers. They correspond roughly to Newman’s categories of notional and real apprehension.
Let us briefly consider the difference between real and notional apprehension. A notion that an American boy learns in geography class is that China exists. That notion passes over into the real when the boy actually visits China. China is no longer merely an abstract category for him but it becomes a tangible reality. Real apprehension can also benefit from notional apprehension. To continue the analogy, if the boy woke up in a foreign country, he would have a real apprehension of that place, but it would also benefit his real apprehension to apprehend notionally that that place was China.
Dr. John Crosby contrasts real and notional apprehension under five dimensions that can help us grasp the concept more deeply: 1. Real apprehension is concrete, while notional apprehension is abstract. 2. Real apprehension is experiential while notional apprehension is merely knowing about a thing. 3. Real apprehension involves an image while notional apprehension only holds a notion in the intellect. 4. Notional apprehension is limited the intellect, while real apprehension involves the whole person, including the heart and will. 5. Real apprehension is a truth for which I could live and die, whereas notional apprehension is simply information.
To return to spiritual direction, we can see how in one mode of communication, the spiritual director expresses notions that the directee can apply to the real experience of God in the conscience. In the second mode of communication, the spiritual director embodies the response in a way that gives the directee a real experience of the truth for which he may have only previously had a notional apprehension.
Communicating notions in spiritual direction
We will first consider the case in spiritual direction when the spiritual director communicates notions to the directee. As we mentioned, a notion is an idea or a concept that remains abstract and is found only at the level of the intellect while the real is experienced by a person in what Newman describes as the imagination. One is not better or more important than the other but these two ways of apprehension are complementary and enhance the other:
“We can say, then, that notional apprehension (and notional assent) is appreciated by Newman as something indispensable for religious belief. It is not just a lack of real apprehension, but it is a mode of apprehension all its own, accomplishing important things that real apprehension cannot accomplish by itself. We should think of Newman’s real and notional in terms of complementarity and polarity, not in terms of antagonism.”
In the realm of religious experience, Newman proposes a real apprehension of God through the real experience of God in the conscience. At the same time, this apprehension can be lacking without the proper notions to give it important additional form:
…we find that certain religiously important questions about God cannot be answered only on the basis of the experience of conscience. For instance, does the divine authority that makes itself felt in conscience indicate one God only, or is it consistent with several gods? And again: is the God who ‘speaks’ in conscience identical with the God who creates and sustains the world? The answers that we Christian monotheists give to these questions cannot be derived from the experience of conscience alone; we have to import them from other sources, such as speculative reason and revelation.
In applying this to spiritual direction, we can think of the spiritual directee providing the raw data of personal experience. The spiritual director’s reason and knowledge of divine revelation supply important notions for understanding the directee’s experience more precisely. In the language of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the directee might describe the experience of his heart inflamed with love or being filled with spiritual joy as he heard words of love or guidance in the voice of his conscience. The spiritual director, knowing the First Week Rules of the Spiritual Exercises could name that as “spiritual consolation” and help to affirm the authenticity of the words and explore ways to be obedient to that divine communication. On the other hand, the experience of distraction, inner disturbance and being drawn to low and earthly things could lead the spiritual director to label that experience as “spiritual desolation” and to help the directee to resist the words as coming from the enemy.
As another example, a spiritual directee might share some personal experience and wonder whether God really loves him. The spiritual director can confidently apply the notion of God’s universal love to reassure the directee. He might quote Scripture: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son that everyone who believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life” (Jn 3:16). He might elaborate on how that Scripture passage applies to the directee. This can serve to clarify the intellectual understanding and provide notions that the directee can use subsequently in better interpreting his religious experience.
These notions can even help to form the conscience. Newman acknowledged that the conscience can be trifled with and be in need of renewal: “Their conscience still speaks, but having been trifled with, it does not tell truly; it equivocates, or is irregular.” Although the directee is bound to the voice of his conscience as his primary access to God, when the conscience is honestly expressed and lovingly received by the spiritual director, the transformational conversation that takes place can help the directee’s conscience to grow more clear and precise.
For these reasons it is vitally important that a spiritual director who provides notions in spiritual direction be well-formed according to the theology of the Church. He must be able to serve as a faithful representative of the Church’s magisterium so that the obedience in spiritual direction is simply an extension of obedience to the Church as Newman saw it:
The supremacy of conscience is the essence of natural religion; the supremacy of Apostle, or Pope, or Church, or Bishop, is the essence of revealed; and when such external authority is taken away, the mind falls back again of necessity upon that inward guide which it possessed even before Revelation was vouchsafed. Thus, what conscience is in the system of nature, such is the voice of Scripture, or of the Church, or of the Holy See, as we may determine it, in the system of Revelation. It may be objected, in deed, that conscience is not infallible; it is true, but still it is ever to be obeyed. And this is just the prerogative which controversialists assign to the See of St. Peter; it is not in all cases infallible, it may err beyond its special province, but it has in all cases a claim on our obedience.
In light of this, we can understand the injunction of St. Teresa of Avila that the Superiors of her reformed Carmelite monasteries allow the nuns to speak to learned persons in addition to the Confessors in the event that the Confessors themselves were good, but not as learned, for “Learning is a great help in shedding light upon every matter.”
Communicating notions is often the dimension of spiritual direction that is most strongly emphasized and it gives the impression that the spiritual director must be a theologian and a master of spirituality in order to accompany another person in his or her spiritual journey. Undoubtedly there is a truth to this! At the same time, so long as the spiritual director knows his limits and does not overstep his knowledge, he can still play an important role in the life of the directee by fostering a real experience of God’s love and presence through his own human love and presence in spiritual accompaniment.
Communicating the real in a “sacramental” way
An internet search engine certainly has a far more expansive access to information than the most learned human being and is capable of providing a more vast array of notions to the directee who knows the right search keys. Clearly spiritual direction should be more than a personalized search engine, though. At least a good spiritual director knows how to grasp the directee’s real experience and apply the most appropriate notions to explain it and shape it. It is still more than that, however. Hearkening back to the importance of a relationship between the director and directee as the proper context of spiritual direction, we can discover how an important mode of communication in spiritual direction can be expressed in terms of Newman’s understanding of real apprehension. An important part of spiritual direction is not simply expressing notions nor even specifically applying notions to a directee’s experience, but actually helping the directee to have a real experience of those Truths by embodying them in some way for the directee. As referenced earlier in the section on the Importance of Relationships, Newman describes this in terms of “personal influence.” Dr. Fastiggi summarizes the point:
In his sermon on “Personal Influence, The Means of Propagating the Truth,” Newman clearly argues that the spread of religious Truth is not so much a matter of logic and propositions as it is a matter of “the personal influence, direct and indirect, of those who are commissioned to teach it.”
This is related to Pope St. Paul VI’s famous dictum: “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses.” A witness provides a lived expression of a concept. A witness is one who has a real apprehension, in Newman’s terms. He does not just know about God, but he knows God with a real experience. This gives him a personal influence that can do more than provide intellectual proofs or notions:
I am far from denying the real force of the arguments in proof of a God, drawn from the general facts of human society and the course of history, but these do not warm me or enlighten me; they do not take away the winter of my desolation, or make the buds unfold and the leaves grow within me, and my moral being rejoice.
This is ultimately the way that Christ Himself provided spiritual direction for His disciples. He taught them about the Father, but He also embodied the Father’s love in a real way that they could also apprehend in a real way: If you had known me, you would have known my Father also; henceforth you know him and have seen him. … He who has seen me has seen the Father…” (Jn 14:7,9b).
A modern spiritual director is obviously not the Incarnate Word, and yet he does participate in a real way in the Incarnate Word and he can communicate God’s love in a real way through his own human love. His steadfastness over time, his gentle response to a directee’s shame, his unconditional affirming love for a directee’s weakness all help to facilitate a real apprehension of God in the directee. This is a quasi-sacramental communication of God.
He may also need to provide a notional explanation to connect the experience of human love with the truth of divine love by saying something like, “God loves you like this,” or “God loves you even more than this,” or “God loves you like this all the time.” Likewise the director might tie together a gentle and loving response to a very embarrassing and shameful story by saying, “This is the way that Jesus loved the adulterous woman and gave her courage to believe that she could go and sin no more.”
In a beautiful passage, Newman described how Christ, in His perfectly developed humanity, influenced the apostles and so formed them to be able to influence others analogously:
And if such be the personal influence excited by the Teacher of Truth over the mixed crowd of men whom he encounters, what (think we) will be his power over that select number, just referred to, who have already, in a measure, disciplined their hearts after the law of holiness, and feel themselves, as it were, individually addressed by the invitation of his example? These are they whom our Lord especially calls His “elect,” and came to “gather together in one,” for they are worthy. And these, too, are they who are ordained in God’s Providence to be the salt of the earth,—to continue, in their turn, the succession of His witnesses, that heirs may never be wanting to the royal line though death sweeps away each successive generation of them to their rest and their reward. …and all this while they themselves would be changing into that glorious Image which they gazed upon, and be in training to succeed him in its propagation.
In this mode of communication, we can see how a spiritual director who does not have all the theological background can still be a faithful guide for a directee so long as he limits himself to this real, sacramental mode of communicating God’s love and presence to the directee. By embodying the Gospel and communicating the Father’s love through one’s own human love, the spiritual director can have the most powerful influence on the directee. There is also a saving grace in this because a spiritual director who is lacking in learning may still be able to love well and so provide some real experience of God’s love for the directee.
Conclusion
In conclusion, let us revisit the example of the desert fathers and mothers and apply the insights we have gained from St. John Henry Newman. We can see how these men and women were true witnesses, living out their faith with a real apprehension of God in addition to the notional understanding of Him that they gained through collective wisdom and interpretation of the sacred scriptures. When monks approached them for guidance they entered into a relationship with them that provided the proper setting for their spiritual direction. As directed by the ancient wisdom, a monk revealed his conscience totally to his spiritual father withholding nothing of religious experience, sin, doubt, desire, deep thoughts or any feelings. In short, he manifested his conscience to his Abba. Then the spiritual father communicated both in notions and through a sort of sacramental experience to help the directee grow in both notional and real apprehension. The spiritual father’s pithy words were tailored to individual directees to communicate the proper notions. At the same time, the desert fathers and mothers were known for their deep compassion, their gentle mercy, their felt patience. In other cases, their fiery response to sin or their zeal to fight for the souls of their directees became a real experience of God’s love and zeal for the directee.
By understanding Newman’s conceptual framework we gain many important insights about the proper context, content and communication that should take place in spiritual direction. Newman’s teaching on the importance of personal influence in relationships, the nature of the conscience, and the contrast of notional and real apprehension provide a wonderful clarity around points in spiritual direction that are often misunderstood.
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Notes and references
Peter C Wilcox, John Henry Newman: Spiritual Director (1845-1890) (Eugene, Ore: Pickwick Publications, 2013). There are many collections of the s ayings of the Desert Fathers such as Metropolitan Anthony. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection . Translated by Benedicta Ward. Revised edition. Kalamazoo, Mich : Liturgical Press, 1984. There are also fuller expressions of the wisdom of the desert in works such as the Conferences or Institutes of John Cassian: St. John Cassian. John Cassian, The Conferences . Edited by Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers, no. 57. New York: Paulist Press, 1997. Fr . Thomas Acklin and Fr . Boniface Hicks, Spiritual Direction: A Guide for Sharing the Father’s Love (Steubenville, Ohio: Emmaus Road Publishing, 2017), 18. Ian Ker, Healing the Wound of Humanity : The Spirituality of John Henry Newman (London: Darton Longman and Todd Ltd., 1993), 21. Sermon 5 on “Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth” in John Henry Newman, Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford Between A.D. 1826 and 1843 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1909) , 91-92 . Peter C Wilcox, “Newman as Spiritual Director: His Personal Methods and Their Meaning for Understanding His Life,” Newman Studies Journal 12, no. 1 (2015): 58. John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1865), 55ff. Grammar , 93. Newman, John Henry, and Nicholas Lash. An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent . ( Notre Dame, Ind: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2003 ) , 3. Peter C Wilcox, “Newman as Spiritual Director: His Personal Methods and Their Meaning for Understanding His Life,” Newman Studies Journal 12, no. 1 (2015): 61. Br. Reed Frey, “Personal Incommunicability and Interpersonal Communion,” Quaestiones Disputatae 9, no. 2 (Spring 2019): 24. Ker, Healing the Wound of Humanity , 101. Ibid. John Henry Newman, Plain and Parochial Sermons , vol. II (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1889f.) , 51-60 quoted in Ker, Healing the Wound of Humanity , 101. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Program for Priestly Formation , 6th ed., 2022, no. 106. John Henry Newman, Letter to the Duke of Norfolk in Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching , vol. II (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1900), 248. RB 7:44 in Timothy Fry OSB, trans., The Rule of St. Benedict in English (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2018). P ope St. John XXIII, “September 9, 1962 Address to Seminary Spiritual Directors,” in The Encyclicals and Other Messages of John XXIII (TPS Press, 1964), 129–35. Louis Bouyer , Newman: His Life and Spirituality (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), 29. Walter E Conn, Conscience and Conversion in Newman: A Developmental Study of Self in John Henry Newman (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2010) , 113-121. Sermon 23 on “Faith without Demonstration” in New man, Plain and Parochial Sermons , vol. 6, 327. Conn, 115. John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Longmans, Green and Co., 1903), 110. George Aschenbrenner , Consciousness Examen , Somos Católicos (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2007) online at http://www.ignatianspirituality.com/ignatian-prayer/the-examen/consciousness-examen/. John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1909), 86. Sermon 2 on “The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Respectively” in The Oxford University Sermons , 18-19. John Henry Newman, Callista: A Tale of the Third Century (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1901), 314-5. Eamon Duffy, John Henry Newman: A Very Brief History , Very Brief Histories (London: SPCK, 2019), 3. Gaudium et Spes no. 16. Acklin and Hicks describe the interiority and vulnerability revealed in spiritual direction as the foundational requirements in Spiritual Direction: A Guide for Sharing the Father’s Love . “Love of Relations and Friends” Sermon 5 in Plain and Parochial Sermons , v ol. 2, 54. “Mental Prayer” Sermon 15 in Plain and Parochial Sermons , vol. 7, 205-6. John F Crosby, The Personalism of John Henry Newman (Washington: Catholic University of America, 2014), 37-52. Ibid , 57. Ibid, 55. Fr. Timothy Gallagher, OMV provides his own translation and commentary on the Ignatian Rules for the First Week from the Spiritual Exercises. The chapter on Rule 3 describes Spiritual Consolation: The Discernment of Spirits: An Ignatian Guide for Everyda y Living (Crossroad, 2012), 47-57. Ibid, 58-71. Sermon 5 on “Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth ” in John Henry Newman, Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford Between A.D. 1826 and 1843 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1909) , 80-81. John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1909), 86. St. Teresa of Avila, “The Way of Perfection,” in The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila , trans. Kieran Kavanaugh an d Otilio Rodriguez, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C: ICS Publications, 2001), 159. Robert L Fastiggi , “The Conversion of Mind and Heart: The Spirituality of John Henry Newman: Modern Christian Spirituality: Methodological and Historical Essays,” in Modern Christ ian Spirituality: Methodological and Historical Essays (Atlanta, 1990), 255. Pope St. Paul VI, “ Evangelii Nuntiandi ” no. 41 ( Libreria Editrice Vaticana , December 8, 1975), https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_p-vi_exh_19751208_evangelii-nuntiandi.html . John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua : Being a History of His Religious Opinion s (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1908), 241. Sermon 5 on “Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth ” in John Henry Newman, Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford Between A.D. 1826 and 1843 (London: Longmans, Green and Co ., 1909) , 95-96.