The practice of Lectio Divina , a form of prayer that centers on scripture reading, was developed in its best-known form in the sixth century, through the work of Benedict of Nursia and Pope Gregory I , and described and promoted more widely in the 12th century by Guigo II. The 9th century saw the development of mystical theology through the introduction of the works of sixth-century theologian Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite , such as On Mystical Theology.
His discussion of the via negativa was especially influential. As part of the Protestant Reformation , theologians turned away from the traditions developed in the Middle Ages and returned to biblical and early church sources. Accordingly, they were often skeptical of Catholic mystical practices, which seemed to them to downplay the role of grace in redemption and to support the idea that human works can play a role in salvation, and which also seemed to come from post-biblical sources and practices. Thus, Protestant theology developed a strong critical attitude, oftentimes even an animosity towards Christian mysticism.
Historically, Christian mysticism has taught that for Christians the major emphasis of mysticism concerns a spiritual transformation of the egoic self, the following of a path designed to produce more fully realized human persons, "created in the Image and Likeness of God" and as such, living in harmonious communion with God, the Church, the rest of world, and all creation, including oneself. For Christians, this human potential is realized most perfectly in Jesus, precisely because he is both God and human, and is manifested in others through their association with him, whether conscious, as in the case of Christian mystics, or unconscious, with regard to spiritual persons who follow other traditions, such as Gandhi.
The Eastern Christian tradition speaks of this transformation in terms of theosis or divinization, perhaps best summed up by an ancient aphorism usually attributed to Athanasius of Alexandria: Going back to Evagrius Ponticus , Christian mystics have been described as pursuing a threefold path of purification, illumination and unification, corresponding to body soma , soul psyche , and spirit pneuma.
In , the 8th Ecumenical Council reduced the image of the human to only body and soul but within mystics a model of three aspects continued. The three aspects later became purgative, illuminative, and unitive in the western churches and prayer of the lips, the mind, the heart in the eastern churches. The first, purification is where aspiring traditionally Christian mystics start. This aspect focuses on discipline, particularly in terms of the human body; thus, it emphasizes prayer at certain times, either alone or with others, and in certain postures, often standing or kneeling.
It also emphasizes the other disciplines of fasting and alms-giving, the latter including those activities called "the works of mercy," both spiritual and corporal, such as feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless. Purification, which grounds Christian spirituality in general, is primarily focused on efforts to, in the words of St. Paul , "put to death the deeds of the flesh by the Holy Spirit" Romans 8: This is considered a result of the Spirit working in the person and is not a result of personal deeds.
Also in the words of St. The "deeds of the flesh" here include not only external behavior, but also those habits, attitudes, compulsions, addictions, etc. Evelyn Underhill describes purification as an awareness of one's own imperfections and finiteness, followed by self-discipline and mortification. Because of this, in ancient Christian literature, prominent mystics are often called "spiritual athletes," an image which is also used several times in the New Testament to describe the Christian life.
What is sought here is salvation in the original sense of the word, referring not only to one's eternal fate, but also to healing in all areas of life, including the restoration of spiritual, psychological, and physical health. It remains a paradox of the mystics that the passivity at which they appear to aim is really a state of the most intense activity: In it, the superficial self compels itself to be still, in order that it may liberate another more deep-seated power which is, in the ecstasy of the contemplative genius, raised to the highest pitch of efficiency.
The second phase, the path of illumination, has to do with the activity of the Holy Spirit enlightening the mind, giving insights into truths not only explicit in scripture and the rest of the Christian tradition, but also those implicit in nature, not in the scientific sense, but rather in terms of an illumination of the "depth" aspects of reality and natural happenings, such that the working of God is perceived in all that one experiences.
Underhill describes it as marked by a consciousness of a transcendent order and a vision of a new heaven and a new earth. The third phase, usually called infused or higher contemplation or Mystical Contemplative Prayer [47] in the Western tradition, refers to the experience of oneself as in some way united with God. The experience of union varies, but it is first and foremost always associated with a reuniting with Divine love , the underlying theme being that God, the perfect goodness, [48] is known or experienced at least as much by the heart as by the intellect since, in the words 1 John 4: Mystical Contemplative Prayer is the blessing for which the Christian mystic hopes.
No human effort can produce it. This form of prayer has three characteristics. It can manifest itself in one of four degrees. The four degrees are the prayer of quiet, the prayer of union, ecstatic union, and transforming deifying union. Author and mystic Evelyn Underhill recognizes two additional phases to the mystical path.
First comes the awakening, the stage in which one begins to have some consciousness of absolute or divine reality. Purgation and illumination are followed by a fourth stage which Underhill, borrowing the language of St. John of the Cross , calls the dark night of the soul.
This stage, experienced by the few, is one of final and complete purification and is marked by confusion, helplessness, stagnation of the will , and a sense of the withdrawal of God's presence. This dark night of the soul is not, in Underhill's conception, the Divine Darkness of the pseudo-Dionysius and German Christian mysticism. It is the period of final "unselfing" and the surrender to the hidden purposes of the divine will.
Her fifth and final stage is union with the object of love, the one Reality, God. Here the self has been permanently established on a transcendental level and liberated for a new purpose. Within theistic mysticism two broad tendencies can be identified. One is a tendency to understand God by asserting what He is not and the other by asserting what He is.
The former leads to what is called apophatic theology and the latter to cataphatic theology. Scholars such as Urban T. Many mystics, following the model of Paul's metaphor of the athlete, as well as the story of the disciples sleeping while Jesus prayed , disciplined their bodies through activities ranging from fasting and sleep-deprivation to more extreme forms, such as self-flagellation.
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Many mystics experience visions. But other sensory experiences are common as well. For instance, Richard Rolle heard heavenly music and felt a fire in his chest. Religious ecstasy is common for many mystics, such as Teresa of Avila, whose experience was immortalized in the sculpture Ecstasy of Saint Teresa by Bernini. One of the most familiar examples of mystical physical transformation is the appearance of stigmata on the body of the mystic, such as those received by Francis of Assisi and Padre Pio.
But other transformations are possible, such as the odour of sanctity that accompanies the body of the deceased mystic, such as Teresa of Avila and Therese of Liseaux. Some mystics are said to have been able to perform miracles. But for many mystics, the miracles occurred to them. In the Middle Ages, one common form of mystical miracle, especially for women, was the Eucharistic miracle , such as being able to eat nothing other than the communion host.
Catherine of Genoa was an example of someone who experienced this type of miracle. The influences of Greek thought are apparent in the earliest Christian mystics and their writings. Plato — BC is considered the most important of ancient philosophers, and his philosophical system provides the basis of most later mystical forms.
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The Babylonians marked every seventh day as a kind of holiday. The Egyptians knew of seven paths to heaven, seven halls in the underworld, and seven heavenly cows. There are two non-exclusive theories on how the number seven got so popular. Both are rooted in astronomy. Moving through the heavens unlike the fixed stars, they were objects of worship. The most stunning illustration for the second theory is Scripture: And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it. And it is the first of a deep run of sevens though Judeo-Christian literature.
Sevens play tag throughout the New Testament. The book of Revelation is Sevens heaven, boasting seven golden lampshades, seven angels, seven plagues, seven apocalyptic seals, and many more. Augustine of Hippo also had a soft spot for sevens, which he considered a perfect number. No trimming was necessary for the gifts of the Holy Spirit, always interpreted by Christians as a seven-item list. In the centuries between Augustine and the creation of the Wheel, enthusiasm for sevens only grew.
Theologians recommended Seven Penitential Psalms for repetition by sinners. Alchemists said they had isolated seven metals and practitioners of magic doted on the seven-part works of Hermes Trismegistus. Thus the wheels got fatter as the number of texts increased, but in most the number of paths remained at… seven. We are heirs to the tradition of sevens. Or, plucked from hundreds of similar phrases on the Web: The seven paths of the Prayer Wheel take us back to the day when the greatest honor you could bestow on any numeral was to associate it with the divine.
It was no accident that the Prayer Wheel, whose concepts and parts had been floating around the Christian world for centuries, took shape among medieval monks. That community was the Benedictines. The Benedictine movement was a spiritual detonation at the end of a very long fuse. His greatest achievement was to establish a set of sensible and dependable religious and social routines, now known as the Rule of St.
Benedict, to manage what could be called barracks filled with extreme athletes of faith. Monks abandoned normal life for communities of piety out of a desire for close union with God, described by chroniclers as an urge as powerful as hunger or lust. Such triumphs were inevitably temporary in this lifetime, but the monks pursued them with increasing joy, anticipating ongoing bliss in the next.
In fact, with Hours at 3 AM and again at dawn, most monks were in constant sleep debt. The monks also prayed more privately through practices like meditative reading and mindful memorization. It would be wrong to suggest that the Wheel was an inevitable, predictable product of the Benedictine way. But it is Benedictine enough to create a feeling, as you use it, of connecting, however tenuously, to a very old community of faith.
Unlike some earlier monastic groups, the Benedictines prized literacy as an essential tool for immersing themselves in the word of God, and a condition for memorization and meditation. Although the Benedictines produced little original theology, they were extremely clever and determined in figuring out ways to deploy the wisdom of church fathers like Augustine.
Another Wheel- forerunner that the Benedictines are actually credited with creating is lectio divina divine reading. This practice entails slowly reading a very small unit of scripture, meditating on it, praying, and, bringing any thoughts about it to God. Lectio treats phrases as bearers of their own deep truths. Journeys have been an integral part of religion as long as humans have wandered. Jesus did not voyage as far, but his path through Jerusalem became a potent metaphor for faith. Paul traveled like a frequent flier to spread the good news. Early Medieval Christians also journeyed when they could: Then in , the Seljuk Turks captured Jerusalem from its more tolerant previous rulers also Muslim , and effectively barred Christian pilgrims from the city.
This was one of eventual causes of the First Crusade. But it may have had an additional consequence: It, too, offered a religious journey; one the Seljuks could not obstruct. One road closes and another, much smaller, opens up. For centuries those who could not go pilgriming by horse or on foot had done so in their heads and hearts, monks especially. How could Monks make the pilgrimage to the heavenly Jerusalem?
The main way was to keep doing what they were doing: Yet they may also have visualized the journey using mappaemundi: The diagram of the Prayer wheel, with its seven roads to God, recalls mappaemundi and the way real roads from all over Europe converged at pilgrimage sites. Thanks to a linguistic clue, another journey associated with the Wheel—and very much part of Benedictine culture—is easy to identify. Find your copy and look at that legend in the outermost circle: That word resonated deeply with the Benedictines.
Every soul was seen as having come forth from God exitus —and as engaging in a pilgrimage back to him reditus. The point of monasticism was to pursue reditus as consciously, intensely, and continuously as possible.
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It does raise some interesting questions about how monks navigated the diagram. In Benedictine parlance, every reditus follows from an exitus. Where is the exitus in the Wheel? What brought us to its beginning? Perhaps we should be thinking about about how we got to the periphery of the Wheel in the first place, and see what walking the paths away from God, as well as toward him, evokes.
Almost anyone using the Wheel would have a sense of being on the spiritual road. But it is comforting to know that we are not the first to experience it that way.
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All cultures have their own way of understanding prayer and what goes into it. Today we would probably say that prayer is a kind of thought, or at the very least that prayer travels by thought while at the same time being something beyond thought. Medieval monks, however, would not understand that. It is hard to exaggerate the role of memory in the monastery or abbey. The Psalms are a good example. But he was also instructed to use the individual Psalm verses as hooks to memorize new bytes of non-Psalm data.
There were dozens such memory aids. Another was to divide a page of scripture into a grid of rectangles with at most a dozen words in them, and memorize one rectangle at a time. Monks were taught to identify all kinds of memory prompts: Yet memory had existed for thousands of years before books, and medieval people saw reading—and a surprising number of other activities—as serving memory, rather than the other way around.
But for medieval monks, memorization was even more. To memorize was to muse, to feel, and to think. Most importantly, it was a spiritual act. Memorization was not neutral and it was not involuntary. This brings us to the Prayer Wheel. Scholars think its structure indicates that at some point it must have been a memory device. It may have been used a bit the way the Psalms were. Of course, all monks would have already known its four texts by heart.
But dividing each into seven elements provided an opportunity to attach a different secondary text to each element. The cross-referencing of the elements on the Paths of the Wheel could have suggested which new idea to memorize. During the Middle Ages the discipline of intensive prayer passed gradually from monks to the population at large, with prayer devices and practices helping bridge the gap. Several of these have been revived in the last few decades, by Christians both inside and outside their home traditions.