Spiritual Formation: Old Wine and New Wineskins

Ask a group of practical theologians to define ‘spiritual formation’ and you are likely to receive as many varied answers had you asked them to define ‘religious education’! Perspectives vary widely according to religious tradition, and even among those adherents to the same religious system, according to doctrinal emphases, orientation to the culture, and differing perspectives on the role of non-theological disciplines in the task of spiritual formation. The following paper is an attempt to sort through the questions, “What is ‘spiritual formation’? What is its relationship to religious education? The human sciences?” In this sense, the paper is an initial foray into the methodological issues raised by an attempt to engage spiritual formation from within the field of practical theology. Overall, I seek not to define spiritual formation, since there likely isn’t one answer acceptable to most of us, but rather to provide one description of spiritual formation that has the potential to appeal to all three major groups of Christian religious educators – Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant. In order to accomplish this task, I turn to a group of theologians whose teachings have shaped these three strands of Christianity – i.e. the Patristics – and from within this group, to Gregory of Nyssa. The life of Gregory of Nyssa (335-395) might be defined as a spiritual legacy, inherited and then bequeathed onto successive generations down to the present day. He is regarded as the most spiritually intuitive of the three Cappadocians (Margerie, 213), and one of the most prolific Patristic theologians. During his bishopric, he taught on Genesis, Exodus, Ecclesiastes, Psalms, Song of Songs, the Beatitudes, and the Lord’s Prayer, which have been preserved in the form of commentary and treatise. His other works include The Life of Moses, On Virginity, Catechetical Orations, On the Making of Man, and The Life of Macrina. Gregory is perhaps most well known today for his relational / social trinitarian theology, developed in cooperation with his brother, Basil of Caesarea, and Gregory of Nazianzus, and re-captured by contemporary feminist theologian Catherine LaCugna. In the first section of the paper, I will describe the relationship between religious education and spiritual formation in three of Gregory’s ‘mystical’ works that were directed to his congregation or other priests under his care—i.e. The Life of Moses, Treatise on the Inscriptions of the Psalms, and Commentary on the Song of Songs. In order to elicit this intra-disicplinary relationship, I will provide a formal analysis of his hermeneutic and pedagogical method. In the second section of the paper, I will provide a material analysis of these works in order to elicit Gregory’s concept of the soul and its spiritual formation. In the final section, I will create an inter-disciplinary analysis that places ‘old wine’, Cappadocian spirituality, in ‘new wineskins’, contemporary psychological theory, specifically Albert Ellis’ Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy.