Ascetical Theology

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Ascetical theology is the branch of Christian theology — developed above all within Roman Catholicism — that studies the disciplines of the spiritual life and the means by which a believer is held to advance toward perfection. Its subject is effort: prayer, self-denial, the examination of conscience, the cultivation of virtue and the rooting-out of vice. The name comes from the Greek áskēsis, the training an athlete undertakes, and the metaphor is the point. The field treats sanctity not as a sudden gift but as something pursued through ordered practice.

Theologians have traditionally drawn a line between ascetical and mystical theology. The ascetical side covers what the soul can do with the help of grace — the active work of purification and growth. The mystical side covers what is done to the soul — the higher, passive states of contemplation held to be infused directly by God and not produced by any technique. Where exactly the line falls, and whether the two are stages of one path or distinct callings, has been argued for centuries and never finally settled.

The organizing scheme of the field is the threefold way: the purgative, illuminative, and unitive. The purgative way is the beginner’s labor against sin and disordered attachment; the illuminative way is growth in virtue and the imitation of Christ; the unitive way is the loving union with God toward which the whole is ordered. The pattern descends from the writings of around 500 CE attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite — long taken for the convert of Saint Paul, now understood by scholars as a later Christian author working in a Neoplatonist idiom — and was elaborated by such writers as John of the Cross and, in systematic form, by the spiritual theologians of the seventeenth century onward. The term “ascetical theology” itself belongs to that later, schematizing period rather than to the early sources it organizes.

What practitioners understood themselves to be describing was not a ladder one climbs by willpower. The tradition insists throughout that grace does the lifting and that the disciplines only dispose the soul to receive it; the asceticism is preparation, not purchase. Read from outside, the structure has obvious analogues — the staged purifications of Sufi spiritual writing, the graded ascents mapped in Jewish mystical literature, the philosopher’s turning of the soul in the Platonic schools. The resemblances are real and have often been traced. They are not identities: each tradition orders the same raw material — desire, attention, the slow remaking of a self — toward an end it defines in its own terms, and the Christian end is a particular one.

As a formal academic discipline ascetical theology flourished in Catholic seminaries into the twentieth century, before being largely folded back into the broader study of spirituality. The older textbooks survive, dividing the inner life into its careful stages, mapping a country their authors took to be real.

→ In the library: The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (Parker, 1899) · The Cloud of Unknowing (Underhill, 1912)

→ Related: Meditation · Sufism · Jewish Mysticism · Neoplatonism