Abstract
This article examines the important role and historical context of spiritual ‘training’ (exercitium) in St. Thomas Aquinas’s account of infused virtue growth. The traditional practice of spiritual training or discipline confronted the dangers of mediocrity, lukewarmness and relapse in the moral life, seeking further to train us into virtuous conduct through prayer, fasting, vigils, recitation of psalms, examination of conscience, meditation on Scripture, and so forth. Thomas strongly advocated this praxis as crucial to growth in infused virtue. I examine the concept of spiritual training as he knew it, and in particular bring into view the unfamiliar context and landscape which gave it intelligibility. To this end I articulate the patristic and medieval sources which he relied upon and show what is distinctive in his account relative to that of his contemporaries. While his account is not parochial to Dominican life, I argue that the Order's literature regulating the formation of friars sheds crucial light on how Thomas conceived of spiritual training in practice, and conclude by suggesting some implications for moral theology and virtue theory.
Introduction
St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that baptism could have removed not just sin but also sin's primeval effects, such as suffering, sickness, moral struggle, and death, ‘for the gift of Christ is more powerful than the sin of Adam’. So why doesn’t baptism restore us to something like Eden? Thomas fastens on Aristotle's intuition that just as we do not crown the strongest athlete, but rather the athlete who trains and wins, so we do not identify happiness merely with having virtue but with accomplishing and living virtue. Thomas similarly says that ‘it is suitable for our spiritual training (spirituale exercitium)’ that baptism not be a panacea, ‘so that by fighting against concupiscence and other defects one may receive the crown of victory’. 1 Speaking elsewhere in the plural he writes that spiritual exercitia enable us ‘to ascend to a high degree of charity: perfection does not consist in them; but they are, so to speak, instruments whereby perfection is acquired’. 2 Whatever he means by spiritual training he plainly assumes it has great value. This article will examine its important role in the growth of infused virtue and place it in the context necessary to appreciate its meaning.
Patristic and medieval literature had long overflowed with the theme of spiritual training (exercitium or disciplina). In Thomas’s milieu it was a widely invoked concept with venerable associations and centuries of usage behind it. The monk's cell was described as a ‘workshop’ or ‘factory’ (officina) of spiritual training, with its exercises like a ‘thousand shields’ hanging from the wall of the castra Dei. The goal of the Christian life was to become like a ‘water mill’ which never ceases turning, but day and night grinds the ‘wheat’ of prayer, psalmody, reading Scripture, meditation, fasting, and so forth. St. Bernard in an Alpine image calls such practices the semitae: the narrow paths which the soul must travel to love God perfectly, as though by this footpath one ascended a spiritual Mount Blanc. Such remarks are everywhere to be found in patristic and medieval collections such as the Patrologia Latina and the Library of Latin texts. 3 The concept of spiritual training had an almost talismanic quality, and the Dominicans in Thomas’s time were seen as dedicated practitioners or even ‘experts’ in it. Yet Thomas insists that it can only bear fruit through a process of cooperative grace in which God is the principal agent, so that spiritual training does not decenter God's grace but relies fully upon it.
Although the fact is widely overlooked, 4 Thomas himself saw spiritual exercitium or disciplina as crucial to infused virtue growth. If anything, he is more adamant about this than most of his contemporaries and in this he defies the stereotype of scholastics (scholares) that was already current in his time. 5 Moreover, he did not treat spiritual training as something separate from his moral theology or virtue theory, but as a centerpiece within them. As Servais Pinckaers and others have noted, spiritual training throughout the patristic and medieval period (like so much of what was later called ‘spiritual’ and ‘ascetic’ theology) was treated as part of moral theology itself. 6
One challenge of Aquinas’s account is that he puts great stress on spiritual training's importance while leaving it under-described because it presupposes a whole spiritual ecosystem which his readership knows intimately but we do not. As Alasdair MacIntyre notes, ‘every moral theory presupposes a sociology … a real embodied social world’. 7 As an essential preliminary to further analysis, this article therefore focuses on reconstructing the most salient features of the vanished moral landscape his account presupposes, and from which much of its intelligibility derives.
This article starts with a brief overview of growth in infused virtue and then turns to the main historical concepts and antecedents which framed spiritual training as Thomas and his peers knew it. Next, I turn to his own account of spiritual training and follow this with a survey of the major patristic and medieval sources on which he draws to show what is distinctive in his account relative to that of his contemporaries. Thus his account of spiritual training draws heavily on, for example, St. John Cassian's Conferences and St. Jerome's letters at points where parallel treatments by Franciscans or others might lean on St. Bernard of Clairvaux or St. Anselm. Capturing such differences helps us to see where Thomas largely overlaps with peers and where he speaks more specifically in his own voice. I then examine pertinent details from ‘official’ Dominican works of his day mandating the moral formation of friars, noting how Thomas’s account presupposes and reinforces this official Dominican praxis. I conclude that Thomas’s account of infused virtue growth reintegrates moral theology with ascetical and spiritual theology in a methodologically instructive manner, and suggest future directions for research.
Thomas on Increasing Virtue
Thomas acknowledged that Christians will have to struggle considerably to grow in infused virtue and habitual grace. As is well-known, he distinguished between ‘acquired’ virtues oriented to connatural happiness and ‘infused’ virtues oriented to supernatural beatitude. The acquired virtues are obtained by practicing them in a long process of habituation analogous to musical or athletic training. 8 By contrast, the infused virtues are gratuitously ‘poured into’ (infunduntur) the soul by God with habitual grace at conversion. 9 The baptized have ‘put on Christ’ and been regenerated into spiritual life, and the presence of the infused theological and cardinal virtues as principles of operation reflects this change. But unlike the acquired virtues, the infused virtues do not come about through the accustomization process which makes good conduct pleasant and natural. 10 Thus while they represent a real moral transformation, the fact remains that baptized infants, reformed sinners, and Christians in general have a long moral struggle ahead of them.
The infused virtues grow in proportion to charity and to each other (‘like the fingers of a hand’). 11 To describe stages of growth, Thomas embraced a ‘degrees of charity’ (gradus caritatis) scheme of ‘beginners-proficients-perfect’ according to which beginners focus on eliminating sin, proficients on progressing in virtue, and the perfect on union with Christ. 12 To describe its process, he distinguished acts of infused virtue insofar as through cooperative grace they ‘merit’ an increase in virtue from God from the need to remove ‘impediments’ to infused virtue's operation and dispose ourselves to receive that growth. 13 Both points allow him to maintain that infused virtue and its increase are gratuitous gifts of God while insisting that human agency is not simply bypassed. Sustained by prayer and the sacraments, the Christian grows in holiness amid acts of love for God and neighbor along with acts of justice, the other infused virtues, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit.
Yet growth does not happen all at once: our will and other powers must also be ‘disposed’ for increase. 14 The problem is that mere routine or mediocre virtuous conduct fail to do this, with the result that increase is then delayed until we ‘break out in acts of more fervent love and strive to advance in charity’. This is related to the need to remove impediments to infused virtue's operation which conduce to ‘tepidity or slackness’, 15 such as the ‘contrary dispositions’ 16 remaining from past sins (reliquiae peccati). 17 Of course, the time and effort required to overcome the accumulated effects of our past sins may be staggering. 18 Like the steep ascent from Avernus, ‘Hard and rough is the road’, Thomas wrote, ‘and painstaking the journey’. 19 Unsurprisingly, many may prefer to shrink from the costly output necessary for this moral work, and the ease with which we sink into comfortable mediocrity is only too familiar. The result is that steady progress in infused virtue tends to prove elusive even among the good. 20
The Latin Medieval Tradition of Spiritual Training
Measures are therefore needed to avoid moral entropy and keep virtue on an upward gradient, and this is the precise niche of spiritual ‘training’ (exercitium or disciplina). This flexible concept was a staple of Christian moral literature from its beginnings, and in important respects it predates Christianity as a practical feature of ancient philosophy and culture. The groundbreaking study on this wider context remains Pierre Hadot's work on ancient philosophy as a ‘way of life’ with its own ‘spiritual exercises’ and orthopraxy of the inner life. This philosophical askesis was widespread but especially pronounced in the Hellenistic Stoic and Platonic schools, and it involved ‘thought-exercises’ or ‘inner activities of the thought and will’ so as to shape moral agency. 21 While I will note points of contact to this literature where relevant, my own focus here will be on Thomas’s own terms and sources. These are distinct from Hadot's, and in some ways they pull in quite different directions.
The literature which Hadot surveys tends to be ancient, Hellenistic, and fairly well-trodden, whereas the literature known to Thomas tends to be later, written in Latin, and lesser-known. Moreover, the vast majority of the medieval texts are untranslated, some of the most important still lack critical editions, and some only exist in manuscript form. Yet in them we see that Christian authors through the late ancient and medieval period identified a wide variety of practices of spiritual training. Common examples include concerted prayer, fasting, vigils, recitation of psalms, manual labor, examination of conscience, vigilance over thoughts, tears of compunction, mortification, reading Scripture, meditation, and so forth. 22 As even so cursory a listing shows, it is too simplistic simply to equate spiritual training with physical asceticism. As will be seen, what is being described involves physical askesis but is certainly not reducible to it.
Although so little of this literature has been translated, it would not be too difficult to put together a list of the major practices viewed as paradigmatic of spiritual training from the third to thirteenth centuries. The easy path to reception would be to process it in terms more familiar to ourselves, perhaps viewing it as a fascinating if sprawling antecedent to St. Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises and similar works. But in my view the bigger challenge lies in tracing the missing or obscure aspects of the context from which these exercitia drew so much of their meaning. To take one obvious example: we may translate terms such as lectio and meditatio as ‘reading’ and ‘meditation’. But this can be deceptive since the temptation is to assume we know what they mean when in reality the spiritual training exercise they called lectio bears almost no relation to what we mean by ‘reading’ today. 23 Unless we situate Thomas’s account within the social world that gave it intelligibility, any list of ‘exercises’ will look two-dimensional. That task can merely be begun here, yet enough can be said to illustrate his basic assumptions about why something counts as spiritual training, and what that means.
Background Concepts
The first point to establish is what Thomas and his interlocutors meant by spiritual training. Exercitium, like the earlier Latin word exercitatio, refers to exercise, practice, training or discipline. Though it is by far Thomas’s preferred word for the concept, exercitium does not exhaust his semantic field. We should think in terms of word clusters arranged like darts on a board with exercitium at the center but encircled by related terms such as disciplina and observantia which vary the theme slightly. 24 With exercitium itself what needs emphasis is the iterative aspect of the Latin word: the sense of something done as an ongoing process aimed at a difficult but excellent end. In classical and medieval Latin, the person who undertakes exercitia in gymnastics, rhetoric, law or the military seeks to become exercitatus (trained or well-practiced) in that art or practice. Thus while spiritual training (exercitium) involves spiritual ‘exercises’ (exercitia), these are viewed as discrete actions framed by the iterative and continuous process of exercitium itself (much the way someone who regularly works out twice a week views it as part of an ‘exercise regimen’). Exercitium is therefore best thought of in ongoing terms—not just as ‘exercises’ but as ‘training’—which is how I will generally translate it here.
Exercitium, like exercitatio, could refer to many practices in classical literature, but moralists fastened on its physical and specifically its athletic and military senses. Like its Greek equivalent, the Latin literature at times describes spiritual training in athletic terms, reflecting scriptural uses such as to ‘run the race’ (2 Tim. 4:7). But in Latin works the military associations tend to predominate. This itself may reflect distinctly Roman ideas of physical exercise or training. Rather than associating exercise with Greek athletic culture and its spectator sports, Roman moralists upheld the practical exercitium thought proper for soldier-farmers. The traditional Roman paradigm of exercise was not ‘going to the gym’ or playing sports, but citizens doing military exercises on the Campus Martius, maintaining their preparedness to serve and defend the res publica. 25 Exercise was not just a form of self-improvement but blended into civic service. This ‘common good’ aspect pervades the spiritual training literature as well, with milites Christiani training to serve as ‘fellow citizens with the saints, and the household of God’ (Eph. 2:19). 26
In her chapter ‘Medieval theories of habitus’ Katharine Breen describes how this model of physical exercise was spiritualized.
27
The general meaning of exercitium is exercise or practice, in the sense of a concerted attempt at self-improvement. Etymologically, however, exercitium is closely related to exercitus (army) and frequently signifies military training either directly or in a transferred sense. Thus the formal devotional exercises of monks and other religious were called exercitia specifically to emphasize their practitioners’ status as soldiers of Christ.
28
Yet this was far from limited to monks and religious. Scriptural references to putting on ‘the armor of God’ (Eph. 6:11) and laboring as ‘a good soldier of Christ’ (2 Tim. 2:3) were widely embraced. Similar motifs had already gained momentum from classical authors. ‘For we almost must be soldiers’, Seneca wrote, speaking of the moral life, ‘and in a campaign where there is no intermission and no rest’. 29 Rhetoric was also seen as a moral and even a kind of military art. Cicero's orator is a kind of soldier who defends the res publica with the weapon of speech against the false persuasions of men like Catiline. 30 Such themes were enthusiastically embraced throughout the patristic and medieval period. 31 The Rule of Benedict, for example, famously opens with a call to militare: to ‘serve as a soldier’ of the heavenly tabernacle armed with the divine rhetoric of Scripture against the false persuasions of sin. 32
The point of these motifs was to stress the need to be thoroughly drilled or trained (exercitatus) in Christian virtue since we will inevitably be put to the test. This concern goes back to the earliest literature. Tertullian's 202 Ad Martyres was written to imprisoned catechumens (many think it was the distinguished group that included Sts. Perpetua and Felicity)
33
facing martyrdom and he exhorted them that: No soldier comes out to the campaign laden with luxuries … even in peace soldiers inure themselves to war by toils and inconveniences: marching in arms, running over the plain, working at the ditch, making the testudo, engaging in many arduous labours … In like manner, O blessed ones, count whatever is hard in this lot of yours as an exercise (exercitationem) of your powers of mind and body, for you are about to pass through a noble struggle (agonem).
34
In their case the agon was martyrdom, but the idea of needing to train for whatever moral struggles would come one's way became generalized and is ubiquitous in the literature. Thomas himself systematized the idea drawing on a late Roman military manual by Vegetius, and this in itself was unusual. The scholastics largely ignored this work, but Thomas cites him many times as a major authority on spiritual training specifically. But why? Vegetius wrote while the late empire was on the brink of collapse so as to restore effective military training. His main argument is that the Roman legion’s historic effectiveness had nothing to do with superior physical qualities. Far from chauvinistic, he insists that Italians were shorter and less physically robust than many peoples they subdued. So, what was their secret? ‘The Romans’, he states, ‘owed the conquest of the world to no other cause than continual military training (exercitio) and the discipline (disciplina) of the camps’. 35 Spiritualizing the idea, Thomas seizes on such insights as a cautionary tale against complacency to make the related claim that progress in infused virtue likewise depends upon consistent spiritual training. Merely having infused virtue is not enough. Without the right training, he insists, even those with infused virtue will be like ‘raw recruits sent to the heat of battle’. 36 Far from growing in infused virtue, they will be lucky even to retain it. 37
Thus, instead of endorsing mindless aggression, the military imagery does the opposite: stressing our vulnerability to atrophy and relapse, and therefore our need to cultivate discipline and consistency. The message is that those with infused virtue need an ongoing training ‘regimen’ which helps them to be pro-active with their moral potential. Rather than being morally flaccid or spiritually lukewarm, they should allow themselves to be ‘pushed out of their comfort zone’, consistently taking the initiative and seeking opportunities for growth.
Thomas on Spiritual Training
Thomas was deeply invested in spiritual training and insists upon its need for infused virtue growth. Common examples he gives include fasting, vigils, reading Scripture, meditation, poverty or detachment, the pursuit of wisdom, 38 and a few others. None of these exercises are valued for their own sake, but only insofar as informed by charity. 39 Moreover, he repeatedly urges the need for discretion and moderation. One should not, for example, fast to the point of damaging one's health. 40 Yet this does not answer the question of what makes something an instance of spiritual training or why.
Discussions of it are dotted throughout his corpus but most concentrated in his treatments of religious life. No doubt this is because it turns one's entire ‘way of life’ or conversatio vitae into a vast exercise in spiritual training (spirituale exercitium). 41 Framed by the counsels, the whole point of religious life itself is that ‘we might obtain perfection by means of certain exercitia by which the impediments of perfect charity are removed’. 42 Those in religious life undertake spiritual training as, so to speak, ‘full-time professionals’. Yet Thomas insists that spiritual training is possible and deeply desirable for all Christians, and that it transfers across all vocations in suitably modified forms. 43 He even has his chosen lay exemplars. For example, the biblical Abraham 44 and Thomas’s own contemporary St. Louis IX 45 are held up as perfectly exercitati.
To describe spiritual training Thomas most frequently cites the Conferences of John Cassian, a monastic classic particularly beloved by him. ‘We must recognize’, he quotes Abba Moses as saying, ‘that we have to undertake the hunger of fasting, vigil, bodily toil, privation, reading, and other acts of virtue, in order by these degrees to mount to the perfection of charity’. 46 Such practices are paradigmatic of spiritual training but certainly do not exhaust it. Elsewhere, again quoting Cassian, he clarifies that ‘Fastings, watchings, meditating on the Scriptures’ and so forth ‘are not perfection but means to perfection’ and we should ‘endeavor to ascend by these steps to the perfection of charity’. 47 The same and similar claims are paralleled in any number of passages across his corpus. 48 As these texts make clear, Thomas does not value these exercitia for their own sake but only insofar as directed by charity, 49 and they all track the mean of infused virtue into which they further train or ‘drill’ us.
The purpose of spiritual training is thus to facilitate perfection in charity and infused virtue. But in more precise terms, what does this mean? Close examination of Thomas’s texts shows that he regards an act as part of exercitium insofar as it is undertaken to do one of two things. The first we might loosely call the ‘remedial’ task of conducing to fuller and freer exercise of infused virtues by removing impediments to it. The second we might loosely call the ‘constructive’ task of stimulating greater fervor in the exercise of infused virtue and charity in particular. (Ideally the two will overlap.)
The remedial task should go beyond just countering individual temptations and seek to counteract the ‘contrary dispositions’ or reliquiae peccati (‘remnants of sin’) from past sins which foment temptations. 50 Instead of being like someone who just swats mosquitoes, we want to drain the swamp that breeds them. To overcome these moral weak spots, one should apply opposed exercitia to the contrary dispositions of our past sin so as gradually to overcome them. To this end Thomas prescribes exercises contrary to a given impediment as a kind of ‘remedy’: for example, fasting is opposed to lust and gluttony, almsgiving is opposed to avarice, and so forth. 51 This was standard in the sacrament of penance as we see from the house Dominican confessor's manual by St. Raymond of Penafort 52 and related comments by Thomas’s teacher St. Albert the Great. 53 As with these sources, Thomas affirms the need for remedies to the reliquiae peccati, and these remedies operate on the ‘contraries are healed by contraries’ principle identified by Aristotle. 54 The hope is that the more charity commands the elicited acts of infused temperance, fortitude and the other virtues into remedial action, the more the impediments to infused virtue growth should be eliminated, helping to ‘dispose’ us for further growth.
Yet this is really only the beginning of the remedial task: indeed, it is the ‘chief task’ of the ‘beginner’ who must ‘occupy himself chiefly with avoiding sin and resisting his concupiscences’ in contrast to proficients who ‘feel the onslaught less’ and focus on adding to their charity. 55 The remedial task is not exhausted by eliminating the remnants of sin; it also requires making further room for growth by overcoming attachments which fall short of sin yet hinder total adhesion to God. To further dispose ourselves for infused virtue increase we should increasingly free up our will and affections by renunciation of created goods or at least through growing cultivation of inner detachment. 56 This is a further role of spiritual training which fosters the positive commandments, particularly the commandment to love God with all one's heart. It is in these senses that spiritual training enables us to ‘obtain perfection by means of certain exercises (exercitia) by which the impediments of perfect charity are removed’. 57
In addition, what I have called the ‘constructive’ side of spiritual training involves practices which seek to kindle greater fervor as a stimulant to charity and infused virtue, ideally leading to more ‘intense’ acts of them and fostering growth. 58 For example, practices such as lectio, oratio and meditatio are premier stimulants to charity itself, and this role is so important that I will address it in detail below. As this suggests, such exercises do not replace the commandments, but foster unimpeded observance of them. 59 But where should we go with all of this?
The Missing Landscape
Despite its importance, spiritual training has seldom been discussed in Thomistic moral theology. One reason may be that Thomas’s remarks on the subject are scattered and not gathered together into one section of a treatise. This certainly does not prove that the subject was unimportant to him. After all, Thomas’s remarks on ecclesiology are fairly diffused, but no one would suggest that the Church was marginal to his mindset. Spiritual training in his time was such a fixture in Christian life that lengthy description was in any case unnecessary. Much of the interest in Thomas’s account therefore consists in what he does not say but clearly presupposes. For example, when describing exercitium he typically gives a clipped list of representative practices while gesturing at an implied longer list known to readers. In a typical passage he says one must ‘chastise his flesh by abstention from pleasure and by fasts, vigils, and such like exercises’. 60 He often ends with a phrase like ‘and such like exercises’ (exercitia huiusmodi) 61 which assumes that his readers are familiar with a wide variety he need not list in detail, the way our phrase ‘he knows his A, B, Cs’ also implies knowing D–Z without needing tediously to recite the whole alphabet. The problem for us is that Thomas never brings his D–Z into view.
His remarks about spiritual training are fragments of a moral landscape which was obvious in his time but has since become invisible. Reading them, we are rather like someone discovering shards of pottery sitting atop a major unexcavated site such as Roman Pompeii before it was unearthed. This means that simply describing Thomas’s spiritual exercitia will not by itself take us very far. Unless we situate his account within the social world that gave the exercitia intelligibility, they risk looking cartoonish and may give us very little idea of how agency was really thought to be cultivated. Besides attending to his own remarks, we must also excavate key parts of the site connected to Thomas’s fragments. That can barely be begun here, yet enough can be said to shed light on two key areas. First, I will analyze the major patristic and medieval sources on which Thomas draws, and what is most distinctive in his account relative to that of his contemporaries. Second, I will examine Thomas’s account in light of ‘official’ Dominican works of his day mandating the moral formation of friars.
The Distinctiveness of Thomas’s Account Relative to His Peers
From the third to the thirteenth century, the various authors discussing spiritual training have a great deal in common. To a large extent they possessed a shared repertoire of practices and set of revered authors, and a common conception of what spiritual training meant. Turning to Thomas himself, far from a bold innovator with a new manual of spiritual exercises, he tends to outsource his detailed descriptions to a few select authors. This does not mean that we can simply chase up his sources and assume that we fully know what he means. He often reads these sources as redirected by later authors or as inflected by contemporary and especially Dominican practice, and of course he processes texts in his own terms. Yet there are a few figures who stand out in his account like dominating mountains. The most conspicuous by far is St. John Cassian's Conferences, as I discuss in full below. Yet Thomas’s model of spiritual training remained a river fed by many tributaries, and there were other influences on Thomas’s model that were well above average in his time.
The Role of St. Jerome and Others
Besides Cassian, the use of St. Jerome in Thomas’s model of exercitium must be held up for especial mention. The impact here is obvious and striking; and like his use of Cassian, evidently very personal. For example, Jerome's letter to Rusticus (ep. 125) alone has an outsized influence far beyond anything apparent in Thomas’s contemporaries. To take one metric, Brepols Cross Database Searchtool lists only 21 authors in total who cite the letter over the entire medieval period. 62 Of these, most only cite it once, and St. Bonaventure and St. Albert the Great do not cite it at all. In sharp contrast, Thomas cites it fully 22 times, and in key places. 63 Indeed, the letter has been credited as a major inspiration for Thomas’s embrace of religious life. 64 He consistently uses it and a few other works of Jerome when discussing spiritual training to describe the nature of fasting, 65 poverty, 66 the avoidance of idleness, 67 the constant reading (lectio) of Scripture, 68 recollection or the custody of one's thoughts, 69 and so forth. Also conspicuous is Thomas’s predilection for Pope Gregory the Great, whom he identifies as the ‘moralist’ par excellence. 70 Gregory is central to how Thomas explains various exercises, 71 the nature of religious life, 72 and the progression of the moral-spiritual life as a whole.
Limits to Spiritual Training: The Augustinian Contribution
Likewise, the impact of St. Augustine and the Victorines on Thomas’s model was enormous, though this also tended to be true of his contemporaries and thus does not set him apart. To give just one example: Augustine reinforces Thomas’s repeated claims that charity and devotion are fostered by meditation or consideration, especially meditation on Scripture, and most of all its memoria of divine benefits. 73 But Augustine also has a cautionary or chastening effect on Thomas’s account of spiritual training: signaling that it can only achieve so much due to original sin and our condition as creatures. Thus, whereas spiritual training may sound very technique oriented, Thomas makes clear that it is fully reliant on grace. Common scholastic opinion held that those with habitual grace can persevere and grow in virtue without some further form of grace. By contrast, Thomas in his mature work drew extensively on the late St. Augustine to argue that even those with habitual grace require further graces in the form of supernatural ‘motions’ which cooperate with our agency to produce acts of infused virtues. This makes it clear that spiritual training cannot be self-reliant but must constantly depend on a continual flow of such ‘helping’ grace (auxilium) to be fruitful. Even the best exercitium still leaves us morally vulnerable and in need of that continual grace for which we can only pray. While the use of Augustine in Thomas’s time was ubiquitous, this use of him was extremely rare. 74
The Paramount Influence of St. John Cassian
But by far Thomas’s favored description of exercitium itself comes from John Cassian's Conferences, cited directly or indirectly across his corpus. A native Latin speaker born around 360
Joining the Dominicans would only have reinforced the encounter with Cassian. 78 The Conferences were ‘St. Dominic's favorite book, one he is said to have carried everywhere’. 79 Jordan of Saxony wrote of St. Dominic that: ‘this book refined the purity of his conscience, intensified the light of his contemplation, and raised him to a high level of perfection’. 80 Even more importantly, Thomas’s biographer William of Tocco evidently discussed Thomas’s devotion to Cassian with him. According to Tocco, Thomas read the Conferences every day and credited a great degree of his spiritual formation and progress to it. 81 Tocco records him as saying: ‘In this reading I gather up devotion, from which more easily I rise up into speculation, so that affection might pour itself forth into devotion, thanks to which the intellect ascends to the highest summits’. 82 Thomas mentioned no other book in this capacity. This is an extraordinary role for the Conferences to occupy.
The task of tracing Cassian's impact on Thomas’s account can barely be begun here, but the degree of influence is evident both by the number of citations and by his overall structuring. 83 It is also striking that when Thomas ‘lists’ paradigmatic spiritual exercises, his default list is taken from Cassian's Conferences. He has two favorite passages, both taken from Abba Moses’s discussion with Germanus and the young John Cassian: ‘We must recognize that we have to undertake the hunger of fasting, watchings, bodily toil, privation, reading, and other acts of virtue, in order by these degrees to mount to the perfection of charity’. 84 And: ‘Fastings, watchings, meditating on the Scriptures, penury and loss of all one's wealth, these are not perfection but means to perfection, since … we endeavor to ascend by these steps to the perfection of charity’. 85 Moreover, even when Thomas lists spiritual exercises without citing a text, his examples stick close to Cassian's groupings. Thomas does not just consistently cite Cassian, he ‘outsources’ much of his training description to him. This was far from typical in his time, as I will discuss below.
The most easily demonstrable impact of Cassian on Thomas’s account is structural or architectonic. He provides Thomas with an organizing principle and rationale for spiritual training as a whole. Many authors simply list various exercises but do not explain how they relate to each other or specify their end. But if fasting, vigils, meditations, and the rest are valorized, yet questions of their interrelation, order, and end never come into view, there is a risk of incoherence. It can look unclear how one should proceed at all, concerns about moderation will go unaddressed, and one will not know whether these practices are valued for their own sake or as means to a further end. Thomas adopted from Cassian an organizing principle for spiritual training that gets us out of these muddles.
Specifically, Cassian made clear that exercitia from fasting to reading are valued not for themselves but purely as instruments to charity. Thus, book one of the Conferences opens with a prolegomenon on the end or finis of spiritual training itself. The ultimate goal or finis is the kingdom of heaven, and the objective or target (scopos) which we must aim at is puritas cordis or caritas. The various exercises are ‘subordinate to our main objective, purity of heart, that is to say, charity and we must never on their account disturb this principal virtue’ (emphasis mine). 86 This point both established their limits and provides them with a rationale and organizing principle—one that perfectly fitted Thomas’s own claim that charity is the form of the virtues. 87
While Thomas enriches his account with other sources, these authors very much stand out. There was nothing unusual in his use of them, but the sheer extent to which they figure into his model appears far beyond average in his milieu. To give just one example, we may consider by contrast St. Bonaventure. It is difficult to overestimate the influence for Thomas’s account of Cassian together with St. Jerome's letter 125 and a few other texts. But in discussing spiritual exercises, Bonaventure does not really draw on Cassian, Jerome, and Gregory. He is far more likely to cite St. Anselm, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the Victorines, or Thomas Gallus. 88 According to the Quarrachi editors, nowhere in Bonaventure's collected works do we find a reference to letter 125 of St. Jerome, which almost always appears when Thomas discusses either religious life or spiritual training in any context. Even more striking, Cassian plays no role at all in St. Bonaventure's account of spiritual exercises. 89 Indeed, there are only six total references to Cassian's Conferences across Bonaventure's entire Opera Omnia. 90 In comparison, Thomas’s discussions of exercitium from Secunda secundae qq. 180–189 alone explicitly cite Cassian 15 times, 91 and implicitly draws on him far more, to say nothing of Cassian's presence throughout his other works.
Accounting for such differences gives us a sense of Thomas’s particular emphases, helping us to capture where his views largely overlap with his peers and where he is striking out more on his own. It remains for future work to analyze in more detail the importance of these choices, and how they make Thomas’s account distinctive. But even a brief examination helps to give a sense of Thomas’s particular emphases when discussing exercitium. At the same time, Thomas often reads these sources as inflected by later authors or contemporary and especially Dominican practice.
The Dominican Difference
It is at this point that we are rewarded by paying attention to Thomas’s specific Dominican context. This is especially so given that ‘all of Aquinas’ writings spring from, and give shape to, his Order's mission’. 92 Moreover, there are good reasons to think that Thomas wrote the Summa Theologiae itself principally for fellow Dominicans. As Leonard Boyle, Jean-Pierre Torrell and others argue, this is suggested both by the place, time and context of its origins. The Summa was begun in 1265 in Rome where Thomas was put in control of an unusual undertaking: a studium personale in which ‘he would have complete authority, including in regard to the choice of students, the subjects taught, and the method of teaching’. 93 In a time of Dominican educational reform, Thomas was thereby made ‘free to devise a curriculum of his own’ and it was in this setting that he began the Summa. The prologue states Thomas’s own dissatisfaction with available options, and like other Dominican manuals of the time says it is for ‘beginners’ (incipientes). In context these ‘would have been Dominican beginners first and foremost’. Thus, while Thomas would later release the Summa for ‘general consumption’, the indications are that his primary audience was in-house, what Leonard Boyle calls ‘young and run-of-the-mill Dominicans’. 94
It is therefore striking that the Summa Theologiae is so rarely discussed in conjunction with the Dominican formation its target readership presupposed. We see this formation spelled out in ‘official’ and semi-official Dominican works of his day mandating the moral formation of friars such as the Dominican Master General Humbert of Roman's De Vita Regulari, William of Tournai's De Instructione, and Jean of Montlhery's De Instructione Novitiorum. These were not just approved Dominican ‘theories’ of virtue, such as William Peraldus’s enormously influential Summa de vitiis et virtutibus or Raymond of Pennafort's Summa de casibus. 95 Rather, Humbert's works in particular regulated and explained the concrete Dominican practice of virtue which Aquinas and his brethren were daily expected to live, and they describe the role of spiritual training at length as a premier means to perfection. 96 This makes them an important part of Thomas’s virtue growth and spiritual training backstory.
Untranslated and strangely neglected, such works reveal in great detail the official Dominican praxis of Aquinas’s time as communally taught and practiced: how and when the brothers were to rise, to pray, to eat, to fast, to hold vigil, when they should bow, prostrate, incline their heads, how to fight temptations, to carry their bodies, what to read for edification, and so forth. They set forth the normative account of Dominican virtue by which the friars’ lives were to be regulated from the novitiate. As such they are an invaluable resource for grasping the moral formation which Thomas’s primary readership brought to the table when reading his works.
To give just a few examples, Dominicans in Thomas’s time engaged in frequent nightly prayer vigils, frequent and demanding fasts and abstinences, and endless rounds of prostrations and bows familiar from the early illustrated versions of St. Dominic's Nine Ways of Prayer. The early documents make clear that formation in virtue was construed as a very ‘embodied’ practice, from exemplary stories of a hundred genuflections done during private prayer to prosaic details such as that friars must seek permission to speak by placing a finger across the lips while bowing slightly with hood lowered in deference to a superior.
We see very clearly laid out in these works the kind of spiritual training which Aquinas commends. We may wonder, for instance, why Thomas’s standard list of spiritual exercitia consistently dwells upon fasting, vigils, reading, and a few other practices. This is especially so since many medieval authors do not fasten upon these, or emphasize other practices far more than Thomas does. But if we look at works detailing the official Dominican praxis, then in addition to the overlap with Cassian, it is also clear that Thomas’s selection and emphases follow his Order's priorities quite closely. 97
For example, Thomas’s consistent reference to ‘vigils’ may strike us as unusual. Yet they were a regular and striking feature of his way of life. Dominicans in his time were wakened around midnight to chant the lengthy office of Matins (the ancient office of ‘Vigils’) together with Lauds before returning to their dormitory, to be wakened again as early as 6 a.m. Admitted to be ‘exceedingly painful’ by the Master General Humbert of Romans himself, this dead of night office ‘could stretch to almost three hours’, and was undoubtedly one of a friar's greatest daily austerities. 98
It is likewise with ‘fasting’, another of Thomas’s emphases. This was widely practiced in his time. Even lay persons were expected to fast roughly fifty-two days a year with a Ramadan-like intensity. Like Humbert, Thomas cautions against too much austerity lest the friars' health suffer, but we should consider the Dominican tempo in which this remark was make. Outside of exceptional circumstances, the Constitutions prescribed perpetual vegetarianism as a mortification for all friars. 99 Yet even more striking is the fact that from September 14th all the way to Easter the whole Dominican community fasted, with Sundays and major feasts excepted. This meant fasting for whole months on end, with one meal only a day for much of the year, together with a light collation of liquid or soup in the evening. Additional fast days included Fridays, Ember and Rogation days, and about a dozen feast vigils. Thus, when Thomas identifies fasting as a central plank of spiritual training, he was not referring to an outlier or rarity but to an exercitium he undertook most days of the year with the seriousness and regularity believed capable of deeply shaping moral agency.
Far from a marginal practice, spiritual exercises shaped the basic daily rhythms of Dominican life. There is no doubting Thomas’s own ‘buy in’ to this shared Dominican praxis. He refused to abandon that way of life for any other option even under duress, as with his famous escape from house arrest in the family castle. He evokes this social world in repeated phrases such as ‘by fasts, vigils, and exercises of this kind’, but he can leave it under-described precisely because such exercitia are literally ‘all in a day's work’ for his kind of readership. A full treatment must remain a task for future work, but even these examples help to fill in some of the extended connections that Thomas’s account presupposed and reinforced.
Reading for Virtue
I mentioned earlier the ‘constructive’ aspect of spiritual training and the lectio-meditatio-oratio triad which often stood as a synecdoche for it. Thomas repeatedly identifies ‘reading’ (lectio) and ‘meditation’ (consideratio or meditatio) as premier exercises for stimulating the growth of charity and the infused virtues. Meditation causes devotion and feeds charity (and by extension all the infused virtues)
100
like ‘fat’ (pinguedo) feeding a fire.
101
His unfortunately neglected Conferences of the Ten Commandments are something of a practical vademecum of the virtuous life, and in them Thomas discusses what is required for ‘the obtaining and increasing charity’: So much for the benefits of charity. It now remains to work hard to acquire it and hold onto it … It should be known that there are two requisites for acquiring charity and two others for increasing the charity one already possesses. This is clear from human experience. For if we hear good things about someone, we are fired up to love him. So when we hear the words of God, we are fired up to love him (Ps 98:140): ‘Your word is fire-tested, and your servant loves it’. The second requisite is continual thinking about good things (Ps 38:4): ‘My heart became hot within me’. So if you want to acquire divine love, meditate on good things. Someone would have to be very hard if, after thinking about the divine favors he received, the dangers he avoided and the happiness promised him by God, he is not fired with divine love.
102
Exercises where the intellect presents the will with considerations which stimulate charity and related virtues are the main drivers of infused virtue growth, and Dominican practice was very alive to this, so that here we have another strong convergence. In a very early and important text the spiritual reading or lectio of St. Dominic himself is described. Every night after the divine office he would withdraw and sitting, ‘would open some book before him, arming himself first with the sign of the cross, and then he would read’, attentive to how ‘the Lord was speaking to him’. It was as if he were arguing with a friend; at one moment he would appear to be feeling impatient, nodding his head energetically, then he would seem to be listening quietly, then you would see him … laughing and weeping all at once, fixing his gaze, submitting, then again speaking quietly and beating his breast … When reading like this on his own, he used to venerate the book and bow to it and sometimes kiss it, particularly if it was a book of the Gospels.
103
‘Reading’ in this sense is not an arm-chair exercise but closer to a full-contact sport. Humbert of Romans in his Instructiones addresses reading and meditation in detail in his section ‘circa exercitia’ (concerning spiritual exercises). He directs that reading and meditation should be done just about anytime and anywhere: ‘on the road, walking through the cloister, garden, or house … in the cell, or when in bed’. 104 According to Humbert the goal was not just passive reading but meditation and memorization for character-molding. Besides the Psalter and other parts of Scripture, he directs the friars to read and memorize short but potent passages from the Meditationes of St. Bernard, the Confessions of St. Augustine, Cassian's Conferences, and a number of other ‘approved’ texts.
Reflecting a concern familiar in virtue ethics, Humbert is as concerned with how the Dominicans read as with what they read. To deeply form us, we need to ‘know’ the texts intimately, the way natives know their home city, not superficially, the way tourists ‘know’ a city after a day trip. 105 Thus Humbert says to memorize (memoriae incorporare) and daily ‘to savor’ (sapere) a few short texts rather than reading many hurriedly. 106 Memorial reading was done to form one's character, with memory in Dominican literature described as a venter (‘stomach’). As a cow brings up and chews (ruminare) the cud it swallowed, so memorized texts should be brought back up for further chewing or meditation to stimulate acts of charity and so forth. Thomas likewise notes the moral salience of memory, 107 and when he speaks of ‘chewing’ the text of Scripture so as to be ‘nourished’ by it, 108 this is the background.
One particular text Humbert recommended for Dominicans to chew on was St. Anselm's Meditations. 109 These were a major fixture in the spiritual reader's repertoire and are a very representative sample of the genre. With vivid drama and rhetorical sweep, Anselm seizes on a subject such as the Incarnation to ruminate on divine benefits and inflame the reader's charity. We read as a text or scene such as Christ's Passion unfolds over various episodes and from multiple angles, rather like looking at a great mountain from all manner of angles or under different variations of light to fully ‘capture’ and appreciate it. One moves, for instance, from the Last Supper to Gethsemane to Golgotha, seen from the eyes of different biblical characters, while following Anselm's inner sensory cues (‘See this’, ‘hear that’) and cognitive-affective cues (‘Consider this’, ‘think that’). 110 Like a long run-up to a jump, this meditative reading builds momentum for prayer and acts of gratitude, contrition, humility, devotion, trust, and above all charity. This is precisely the kind of practice Thomas himself prescribes to inflame charity. 111 Among Thomas’s own writings, his beloved Corpus Christi hymns follow precisely this suite of movement, with biblical motifs interlaced and varied with rich ‘considerations’ that stimulate and evoke a fervent response in love.
Humbert says that such intimate reading was to be done by Dominicans precisely for ‘forming, inflaming, and strengthening’ the brethren as a major feature of spiritual exercitia. 112 They were literally ‘reading for virtue’, or ‘eating the book’, to quote Humbert's own quotation of a venerable motif. 113 Such cognitive-affective exercitia occupy a premier role in spiritual training: stimulating the right passions and molding the sensitive appetites, informing the will with better resolutions, inciting its charity, and stocking the memory with paradigmatic texts and moral exemplars to guide our deliberations toward ever-more virtuous courses.
But while the Dominican context is paradigmatic for Thomas, his account is not parochial to it. His normative claims are far more sweeping and audiences vary. I have already mentioned one very illustrative text: his Conferences on the Ten Commandments, whose critical edition Jean-Pierre Torrell has completed. Much of it discusses virtue growth in very practical terms. But its especial value here is that it is a rare instance of Aquinas addressing in his mother tongue audiences likely consisting on the whole of lay people. Nevertheless, we find in it the same general spiritual training formula as in the Summa Theologiae or other works which were addressed mostly to clergy and religious. It very much reinforces the impression that both religious and lay people have the same basic vocation to holiness adequated to different ways of life. 114
Conclusion
Many of the most important details in Thomas’s model consist in ideas which he does not expound because in his time they were obvious. Earlier I suggested that his statements about spiritual training are rather like shards of pottery sitting atop an unexcavated archeological site. Like the first artifacts discovered at Pompeii when it still lay under ash, we can surmise much about their nature and purpose; but at the same time they are fragments of a buried social world which provided much of their extended meaning. Besides attending to Thomas’s account, we also need to excavate key parts of the site connected to it. That task has only just begun here, yet by way of prolegomena I have aimed at least to situate his account in context and shed light on what is distinctive to it.
Far from a mere boutique option, Thomas viewed spiritual training (exercitium or disciplina) as a key driver of infused virtue growth. It assists us with the remedial task of preservation from sin, purification from its effects, and detachment from lesser goods, on the one hand, and the constructive task of kindling fervor and greater moral dedication, on the other. While there was much variety and flexibility in how Thomas and his sources viewed and practiced exercitium, one common feature among all authors is the idea of intensity, frequency, and regularity. 115 They remind us that spiritual training requires seriousness and dedication: not as something done ‘every now and then’, but with the consistency required to shape agency. Here the analogy to physical training is most obvious. Someone who jogs once a month is not getting into shape by doing it; but jogging twice a week would be a real exercise regimen. Thomas and his sources have the same assumption with spiritual training: whatever precise form it takes, it should be a concerted effort worked into our regular routines and rhythms of life to be truly formative, to be real training. At the same time, Thomas insists that spiritual training can never be regarded as a simple matter of human efficacy or spiritual athleticism, but as a grace-enabled effort in which growth itself is ultimately a gift.
This topic seems to hold out a good deal of promise. As Pinckaers has noted, early modern Catholic moral theology severed what had once been a harmonious and organic whole comprising the moral, ascetic, pastoral and spiritual dimensions of Christian life. This was dismembered and reassembled into ‘new branches’ unknown to the Church Fathers and Thomas Aquinas, in divisions which grew ever further apart. Because of this growing isolation, Pinckaers suggests, theology began to lose ‘its vitality and creative power’, so that it remains ‘one of the major problems of contemporary theology, which faces the difficult task of reestablishing a lost unity’ between what was later split into moral, ascetic and spiritual theology. 116 That endeavor remains a vast one requiring much further work, but I hope to have shown that Thomas’s spiritual training account offers rich resources as a crucial bridge concept overcoming later divisions.
This topic also allows us to see a different but deeply rewarding side to Thomas Aquinas. His thought is often assumed to be purely abstract, but in fact his account of spiritual training offers rich and detailed practical guidance. We live in an era fraught with rampant attachments, social media excess, and addictions of all kinds. Resources which can help to free us for genuine love, virtue and justice are an important necessity, and it would be a mistake to neglect the major contribution which Thomas is capable of making. Developing these points in their own right and at full length remains a task for future work. 117
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
