Many of the great theologians and scripture scholars who preceded and had such an influence on the Second Vatican Council had for historical reasons been deprived of mystical spirituality in their training.
Anti-mystical witch hunts had spread out over Christendom destroying even the slightest whiff of the heresy of Quietism in the seventeenth century, stamping out the practice of contemplation wherever they found it. Its consequences down to the present day is beyond calculation. In his monumental History of the Church Monsignor Philip Hughes puts it this way:
“The most mischievous feature of Quietism was the suspicion that it threw on the contemplative life as a whole. At the moment when, more than at any other, the Church needed the strength that only the life of contemplation can give, it was the tragedy of history that this life shrank to very small proportions, and religion, even for holy souls, too often took on the appearance of being no more than a divinely aided effort towards moral perfection”.
Unfortunately, therefore, mystical spirituality and mystical theology played little if any part in the Second Vatican Council. There was another reason too that reinforced their antipathy to mystical prayer and that was the zeitgeist or the prevailing intellectual attitude of all who had rejected fascism in all its forms in the first part of the twentieth century. It took the form of a leaning toward communistic ideals that influenced many other intellectuals at the time. It led many of them to look down on, if not positively to reject all forms of personal piety as bourgeois, and therefore unacceptable. This of course inevitably included mystical prayer, if they ever came across it. For it clearly encouraged the sort of individualism that drew people away from the communal that was for them best expressed in the Liturgy.
The Quality of Daily Prayer
That is why since the Council most people have been led to believe that the main, if not the only way to renewal, is through the perfect liturgy and perfect liturgical spirituality to which they aspire. Many of those young priests and religious who left in droves shortly after the Second Vatican Council believed this, hence the despair when all and sundry seemed to conspire against them implementing it as they wished. Even today many Catholics identify their spirituality by associating themselves with a particular form or expression of liturgical practice. It gives the impression that they are unaware that, no matter how inspiring the liturgy may be, it is in fact the expression of a deep personal relationship with the One who is the heart and soul of every authentic liturgical celebration. This deep and personal relationship is determined by the quality of their daily personal prayer as it always has been.
Joseph Jungmann SJ, who had himself been exposed to the same zeitgeist that prevailed in the first half of the twentieth century and influenced many intellectuals, begged to differ from most of his peers who failed to appreciate the intimate and determining correlation between personal prayer and its communal expression in the liturgy. Remember his masterly work ‘The Mass of the Roman Rite’ comprising over a million words. It is, as it always will be, the definitive work on the history of the Eucharist. Let me quote then from perhaps the greatest liturgist of them all whose detailed scholarship dwarfed all others and whose words have apparently fallen on deaf ears.
Wisdom from Joseph Jungmann SJ
“In the present-day liturgical movement, primitive Christianity is often held up before our eyes as a model, an exemplar of liturgical observance. We are to believe that Christians of old, contrary to the tendency of modern individualism, knew no other, or scarcely any other form of prayer than liturgical prayer. Unfortunately, this ideal is not correct. The idea that the life of the primitive Christians revolved exclusively around the liturgy is not correct. And it cannot be correct, simply because it would be unnatural and in contradiction to the Gospels. How could the Christian life exclude private and personal prayer? It is a gross exaggeration to restrict the prayer of Christian antiquity to liturgical prayer alone.”
St Bernadine of Siena put it this way – ‘Si Cor non orat in vanum lingua laborat’ – ‘If the heart does not pray then the tongue labours in vain’. He placed these words in letters of gold around the sanctuary where his friars performed the liturgy, so that they would never forget, as we should never forget, the difference between how we express our love of God and how and where that love for him is generated in the first place.
Early Christian Prayer
In his many books on early Christian spirituality, beginning with ‘The Good News – Yesterday and To-day’, surprisingly written as long ago as 1935, Joseph Jungmann explains how the early Christians like Christ himself, prayed at least five times a day. They prayed, as he explains, in the morning and evening and then at nine, twelve, and three o’clock, and even rose to pray at midnight. This was not just for vocal prayer, but for meditation too, on the life, death, and Resurrection of Christ, as he states quite clearly in his writings. This was of particular importance when later Christians who had never seen Christ personally, came to know and love him spiritually, and with the love developed there, to enter into him mystically, into his mystical body, thence into his mystical contemplation of God his Father.
The emphasis on the communal at the expense of the personal that both preceded and followed the Second Vatican Council in Catholic spirituality has been further distorted by another trend that was also totally alien to primitive Catholic Spirituality. I am referring to a resurgence of the humanistic forms of spirituality.
Post Renaissance Aberrations
These new alien spiritualities have tended to be promoted by those religious orders or rather congregations that have arisen at and proliferated after the Renaissance. They have always had a tendency to overemphasise personal action at the expense of divine action and sought to harness the latest secular ‘wisdom,’ or more usually the latest man-made fads and fashions, to bring about renewal. Notice I said personal action, but not personal prayer, where alone divine action suffuses and surcharges human action enabling a person to do what cannot be done without it. In recent years this tendency has become so strident and so ‘spiritless’ that what was once always in danger of falling into semi-Pelagianism is now falling into full Pelagianism, in short, into a ‘spirituality’ in which divine action has become almost totally replaced by human action alone. The hubris that once thrived in Classical Stoicism is now alive and well in those who think that personal and community renewal is primarily the work of human endeavour. These misguided ‘spiritualities’ primarily look, not to divine but to human wisdom, to save the world from itself, as it has singularly failed to do since the Church fell into spiritual decline in the fifth century. Even the older orders who once, inspired by St Thomas Aquinas, saw contemplation as their ideal, have lost their way.
Nominal Contemplation
Most have become nominal contemplatives. Although they take great pride in contending that their vocation is to ‘contemplate and then to share the fruits of contemplation with others’. What was once real is now no more than nominal contemplation, at least for the majority. Invariably therefore the virtues that they proclaim as their way to perfection are no longer infused by the fruits of the contemplation that they no longer practise. Inevitably they have to be attained, like the stoics before them, primarily by human endeavour. This is of course augmented by what grace they can receive from the sacraments, but without contemplation this grace is limited. It may well be enough to save them from spiritual starvation, but it will never fill them, or those who turn to them for succour, with much more than the bare spiritual necessities.
Without this profound contemplation they will never have full access to the love that made Christ the fullest possible embodiment of all the infused virtues. In short, they will be little more than nominal Christians, nominal contemplatives and therefore nominal apostles, bread without leaven, salt without savour.
This essay originally appeared at Catholic Stand under the title, ‘The Liturgy and Personal Prayer.’
