The Holy Spirit in Church History, Part 2: Medieval Thought

Yesterday we saw that while, by and large, the Church Fathers had a high view of the Holy Spirit and its role in the life of Christians, there were some significant shifts from the second through fifth centuries in what Christians expected the Holy Spirit to do. Specifically, teaching on spiritual gifts became less about manifestations within the whole community and more about the leadership of the clergy, with the Spirit’s role for the masses being understood primarily in moral and ethical terms, particularly by means of the Church and its sacraments. Today we’ll turn our attention to the Medieval world.

To some degree the division between the Classical and Medieval worlds is a false one; this is especially true in the East, where the Roman Empire survived in rump form until the Western European Renaissance. But even in the West, there’s more continuity than difference between the two ages, since the Church was one of the few institutions to survive Rome’s collapse. Many of the iconic aspects of Medieval Christianity — an increased conceptual separation between ‘professional Christians’ (the clergy and monastics) and ‘normal’ people; a focus on personal virtue; and the rise of mysticism, along with an increasing awareness of what we might call spiritual warfare — were already well underway by the fourth and fifth centuries.

Of these, I think the most helpful in terms of framing this discussion is mysticism. Mysticism has always existed within Christianity — from Peter’s vision in Acts 10 to Paul’s reference to a mystical experience of the ‘third heaven’ in 2 Corinthians 12, to John’s visions in Revelation — so it would be reductive to offer any rationale for why it grew in importance in and after the fourth century. But it’s likely that the official Christianization of the Empire was a major contributor. With the massive influx of new converts, of varying degrees of commitment, into the Church, and the overlaying of Roman imperial stylings on top of existing models of governance and worship, it’s natural that at least some of the faithful began to distinguish more between public and private, exterior and interior, faith. For some this meant fleeing into the desert — hence the rise of monasticism; for some it meant the replacement of the biblical ideal of community life with a focus on personal virtue and a life of prayer. And where there is a focus on one’s interior life, mysticism will naturally follow.

St. Maximus the Confessor (d. 662) is a great example of all of this. In the midst of costly run-ins with the imperial Church and State (according to tradition, they cut out his tongue!), he wrote of the Holy Spirit in ways reminiscent of Paul or Irenaeus, with “God providing equally to all the power that naturally leads to salvation, so that each one who wishes can be transformed by divine grace” and with everyone able to “become [a child] of God and divine by grace through the Spirit” (Ambigua 42). But, this is understood through a mystical lens, imagining the life of faith as an ascent into unity with God:

He leads us finally in the supreme ascent in divine realities to the Father of lights wherein he makes us sharers in the divine nature by participating in the grace of the Spirit, through which we receive the title of God’s children and become clothed entirely with the complete person who is the author of this grace, without limiting or defiling him who is Son of God by nature.’ (Catechetical Orations)

Whereas in the New Testament there were all kinds of bold, public manifestations of the Spirit, here it’s a more private affair. But this does not mean that the Spirit is removed from the public sphere. The whole spirit of Eastern Christianity is summarized well by a figure who comes at the very end of the Medieval period, St Gregory Palamas (d. 1359). In a sermon for the feast of Theophany (Epiphany) on the theme of baptism, he preached:

For this reason, the bishop, having clothed the person who has been baptized in a radiant white garment, and anointed him with holy chrism, and having made him a communicant of Christ’s body and blood, then sends him on his way, showing that he has thenceforth become a child of light, both united in one body with Christ and a partaker of the Holy Spirit. For we are born again (cf. John 3:3–5) and become heavenly sons of God (cf. Rom. 8:14–19, Phil. 2:15, 1 John 3:1–2) instead of earthly beings, eternal instead of transient. God has mystically implanted heavenly grace in our hearts and set the seal of adoption as sons upon us through anointing with this holy chrism, sealing us by means of the all-holy Spirit for the day of redemption (cf. Eph. 4:30), provided we keep this confession firm to the end and fulfill our promise through deeds, though we may renew it through repentance if it drifts a little off course. (Homily for Epiphany I)

Here we have an understanding of the work of the Spirit that is both ecclesiastical and sacramental on the one hand, and personal and mystical on the other. It’s not just that Palamas uses the word ‘mystical’ here — he was a mystical theologian through and through, and he marshalled all of the extraordinary history of Eastern theology to defend the direct mystical experience of God in prayer. It’s just that for him, and the East as a whole, the mystical and the ecclesiastical were not thought to be in conflict. There may be a tension between the public and private, the sacramental and the mystical, but this was a tension to be celebrated and engaged creatively, not one to be ‘resolved,’ and being a mystic did not immediately bring one under suspicion as it often did in the West.

The important point for today is that all of this is about the Holy Spirit’s active presence in the life of the faithful. Mystical union with God was to be achieved both through prayer and ‘peak experiences’, and the sacraments. Anything worth doing in the life of faith was with the aim of living more and more fully into the Holy Spirit. Indeed, as the great nineteenth-century Russian mystic St. Seraphim of Sarov put it, “the whole purpose of the Christian life is … the acquisition of the Holy Spirit” — everything else is just a means to that end (Timothy (Kallistos) Ware, The Orthodox Church, 230). St. Seraphim also said:

When the Spirit of God descends upon a man and overshadows him with the fulness of his outpouring, then his soul overflows with a joy not to be described, for the Holy Spirit turns to joy whatever he touches. The kingdom of heaven is peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. Acquire inward peace, and thousands around you will find their salvation. (quoted by (Timothy) Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way, 90)

This Spirit-filled sensibility can be seen in Medieval prayers still used in the Orthodox services this day. One, prayed at the beginning of pretty much every service outside the Easter season, says:

O Heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth,
Everywhere present and filling all things,
Treasury of blessings and Giver of life:
Come and abide in us,
And cleanse us from every impurity,
And save our souls, o Good One!

Another prayer, from the Vespers of Pentecost, reads:

The Holy Spirit is light and life, A living fountain of knowledge,
Spirit of wisdom, Spirit of understanding,
Loving, righteous, filled with knowledge and power,
Cleansing our offences, God and making us god,
Fire that comes forth from Fire,
Speaking, working, distributing gifts of grace.

That this liturgical prayer makes explicit reference to the mystical theological concept of theosis, ‘god-making’, demonstrates just how integrated mysticism became with the Church’s worship in the East. But that does not mean mystical encounter was the only or even primary role for the Spirit. Other prayers in that same Pentecost service also give the Spirit a leading role in wise living, repentance, spiritual warfare, and our participation in the sacraments.

While always more peripheral to the dominant theological currents than it was in the East, mysticism was also an important movement in the West. But for one reason or another — perhaps because it was more peripheral — Western mysticism took on a more individual character than its Eastern counterpart, known more for particular, stunning, and often surreal visions than a common experience of union with God. Thus we have Hildegard of Bingen’s opulent vision of the Spirit of God as a “fire breathing green,” bringing new life to a barren world (Book of Divine Works), or Julian of Norwich’s famous visions of Christ’s blood flowing copiously from his wounds and of the whole earth as something like a hazelnut (Revelations of Divine Love, chapters 1-5). Yet, as she reflected upon those experiences, Julian spoke of them in similar ways to the Eastern mystics. For example:

And so by the leading through grace of the Holy Spirit we shall know [our own soul and God] in one; whether we are moved to know God or our soul, either motion is good and true. God is closer to us than our own soul, for he is the foundation on which our soul stands, and he is the mean which keeps the substance [i.e., the soul’s nature] and the sensuality [i.e., the embodied life of the senses] together, so that they will never separate. For our soul sits in God in true rest, and our soul stands in God in sure strength, and our soul is naturally rooted in God in endless love. And therefore if we want to have knowledge of our soul, and communion and discourse with it, we must seek in our Lord God in whom it is enclosed. (Revelations of Divine Love, 56)

But it’s also true that for Julian, mysticism had a teaching role. She calls the Spirit (together with the Father and Son) “our light” in a dark night (Revelations 83), and considers the strengthening of the interior life a means of overcoming the ‘mortal flesh’ (19). The Spirit is also instrumental for her in our coming to repentance:

Then we are moved by the Holy Spirit through contrition to prayer, and we desire with all our might an amendment of ourselves to appease God’s anger, until the time that we find rest of soul and ease of conscience. And then we hope that God has forgiven us our sins; and this is true. (40)

This is similar to the perspective of St. John of the Cross. While he has a reputation of being pessimistic about spiritual manifestations such as visions and dreams, his point was not that they’re bad or wrong, but that aren’t the point. They’re nice but not essential, and can even mislead us into wanting more and more of them, neglecting the matters of real importance in the process.

This is getting long, so I’ll leave it here for today. But I think this exercise has shown that the Medieval Church continued down the roads set down late in the Classical period in terms of its faith in the Holy Spirit. It’s a vision that, at its best, held the more individual and communal experiences and understandings of the Spirit’s work together in tension. In the East, the mystics became the major theologians, leading to an easy uniting of the two. But this was more of a challenge in the West, where all of the major mystics spent much of their lives under a cloud of suspicion and formal investigation, and to a great degree much of their thought has only been rediscovered and reappropriated in the past century or so. But, however we may feel about the success of the creative tension between mysticism and more formal Church structures in the West, it was broken in and after the Reformation. We’ll pick up that story next time.