Reflections on the Discernment of Spirits

If God were within our comprehension, he would not be God, but an ideological superstructure of the human spirit. If everyone could perceive directly that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God, if it could be proven and explained to others as one exhibits an historical fact, then the Savior would not be the manifestation in the world of the essentially incomprehensible God, but merely a link in the chain of historical events. In any case, this is the view of Jesus himself, when he says: “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son desires to reveal him” (Matt 11:27). Shortly before this, Jesus also indicates to whom this revelation is granted: not the wise and the clever (to these he remains hidden), but to the simple, literally: minors. What is true of God and the one who reveals him in the world must necessarily be true also of that reality which Paul calls the “fullness,” the “body,” the “bride,” whom John addresses as Lady (since she evidently participates in the hidden lordship of Jesus): who and what this Church really is as the presence of Jesus within world history (and God in Jesus) can no more be picked off from its outer structure, its official, cultic, sociological visibility as can the divine quality of Jesus from his human body.

An Experience of God?

People who demand a logically irrefutable proof for the Church’s claim to be the presence of God in Jesus Christ—whether they do so to reassure themselves or to refute that claim more conveniently—will probably approach Jesus with the same demand: “If you are the King of Israel, come down from the Cross and we will believe in you.” Ultimately they will base their faith in God on the demand that he prove his existence sharp and clear. If such requests were made in ages past by men who wanted to make sure of God by whatever signs and wonders or by technically acquirable religious experiences, they are even more familiar to modern man, who will take as truth only what he can prove with a + b or what he can perceive experimentally with his own senses. That this amounts to a naive, perhaps quite innocent atheism, does not readily occur to this modern man, because the worldly demonstrability of all truth is in his blood like a dogma. Even within the Church today the demand for “experientiability” (precisely of the Church as presence of Christ) is raised with unprecedented obstinacy, and the existence or nonexistence of the true Church is measured by the occurrence or failure of such “experience.” Whether this is done to assure oneself or others that the Church is the proper access to Christ and to God, it remains an unconscious capitulation to the spirit of the times.

But whether one strives for an experience of the divine as a means of making sure of it within the soul, or whether one employs precisely this experientiability to reduce religious living to a purely psychological affair and thus to subject it to worldly science: it is certain that if the question truly purports to deal with the relationship of man to God, his creator and the primordial ground of all worldly being, there can be no talk of a direct experience. “Si comprehendis, non est Deus:” if you think you comprehend it, it is certainly not God. Thus wherever the relationship of the finite and the infinite, the relative and the absolute, the worldly and the divine has been thought through with any kind of purity and consistency, we always find a dialectical formula: approach to a knowledge of the divine on the way of a negation and cancellation of immediate experience: in place of a grasping, a letting loose of every will to comprehend in order to let oneself be grasped; in place of the hand of comprehension closing in upon itself (Begreifen), an opening so as to be touched and grasped completely (er⁠-⁠griffen)—which says precisely, however, no psychological emotion (Ergriffenheit). In every step of thought with which the absolute is sought, there is the mounting certainty that the absolute escapes every logical operation. This on the basis of the simple consideration that man and God can never stand opposite each other as the one and the other, because God is “all” (Sir 43:27), and man, who at best is “something,” can never pride himself before the all. In order to enter into a relationship with the latter, he must let the all be also in him what it is in itself: not something, but all. This is a point the religious and philosophical reflection of mankind can attain, only to grow mute before the obvious paradox. How can the “something” (world and man) ever attain a space for existence next to or under or within the all of God. Might it not be that the something is really nothing (because God is all), or perhaps God is not really all, but needs the world in order to be all (because man is something).

Only Christianity (with its prelude in the Old Testament) avoids being tragically shattered by this paradox. On the basis of God’s self⁠-⁠revelation in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ it can dare the assertion that God is infinite freedom, who without compulsion could and would place over against himself a free image of his own being—this the Old Testament already knew. But that in his freedom he is from the beginning infinite self⁠-⁠surrender, infinite self⁠-⁠transcending love—this (trinitarian) mystery opens itself only in the New Testament. With it the general religious relationship of man to God is surpassed in unprecedented fashion. Already in the Old Testament, finite man is no longer threatened by the infinitude of God. God is so divinely free (and for this reason almighty) that he can set apart from his all⁠-⁠embracing being reflections of himself. Indeed, a freedom that had no room for creation, would not be freedom. But that the infinite God in no way needs man in order to be God (to prove to himself his freedom: Hegel), that he does not first have to achieve his power out of a helplessness of love, is revealed only in the Christian mystery. God the Father has created the world in and through and for his Son (Col 1:16f), that is, within a pre⁠-⁠worldly, eternal surrender, in the almighty power (or “helplessness”) of the self pouring itself out to the “beloved” (Eph 1:6). The Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son and is their mutual love, i.e., the personified love of God, is at once the highest, freest power (beyond all “compelling” world powers) and infinite vulnerability. One can “hinder” him (1 Cor 14:39), “grieve” him (Eph 4:30), “quench” him (1 Thess 5:19), as was said likewise in the Old Testament: “They rebelled and grieved his Holy Spirit” (Isa 63:10).

The Christian image of God transcends the general religious and philosophical one in that God is no lawless Absolute who inhabits the finite in proportion to its essence, to whom man must consequently grant the proper space so that God can be in him what in fact he already is. Indeed at the end of all self⁠-⁠effacing ascetical practices this giving way (Raumgeben) will be at most a cognitive, gnostic moment. Rather God is from the beginning the one who has surrendered himself lovingly in freedom, and who for this reason seeks also a free and loving reception (Raumgeben) for the love which he desires to pour out, in order to “inhabit” the created freedom with his own infinite freedom (John 14:23), so that he can “beget” and “bear” it anew out of the womb of the infinite love surrender of Father and Son in the Holy Spirit (John 1:13, 3:5; 1 John 3:9). But, as the unprotected kernel of eternal love, the Holy Spirit sent and sown in the man who makes way, is the (most vulnerable) point at which the human spirit, without veil, touches the divine. Whence follows the word of Jesus that every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven man (for the Son was sent and sacrificed by the Father to bear them), “but the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven” (Matt 12:31, Cf. 6:4⁠-⁠6).

Submissive in the Spirit

If we may then describe the general religious attitude as an indulgent “giving way” (as indeed we can in all concluding forms of asiatic, greek, islamic religion when the great temptation to magic is overcome), the Christian attitude distinguishes itself in that the God who is made way for is one who from the beginning gives way himself: as God the Father, who gives way in God to the Son (Raum gewährt); as God the Son, who understands himself as the Father’s loving acquiescence (Raumgewähren) and who for this reason has released all space in himself to the Father (“My food is to the will of him who sent me”); as the Spirit, who shows that this mutual giving way is the innermost divinity of God. Precisely this accomplishment of release and acquiescence (Gewährenlassen) is the highest power of self⁠-⁠giving love. If the Father in his surrender is “active” and “masculine” and the Son “passive” and “feminine” (receiving himself actively as the one begotten), the Spirit in himself is certainly the “most passive” (since he arises in God as the result of two personal activities), yet at the same time the “most active,” because the encounter of Father and Son in their eternal love is the perfecting and concluding act of the divinity (its “seal”). On the one hand, as it were, pure “resultant”: sum total and therefore objective witness of the mutual love of Father and Son. On the other hand, their blood and fruit: their joyfully “exultant,” mutual inspiration, the creative imagination of their eternally new and mutually enthusiastic love, which from this “peak” of the Godhead is enkindled into its very “ground”: “The last shall be first.” Thus do parents love themselves anew according to the child they bring forth. As absolute receptivity in God, the Spirit is the expression of the entire divine spontaneity.

If a man is to be formed according to the Spirit of God, he must be drawn into this paradox: where he is most receptive, most docile, he can and must become most spontaneous, otherwise his receptivity could be suspected of being un⁠-⁠Christian. Perfect responsiveness to the Spirit is always from the outset complete readiness to welcome him and shelter him, docility in advance for everything that he will give and decree. But because the Spirit is God and his presence in man brings with it divine life—a qualitatively other reality and mindedness—perfect responsiveness to him is not a function of man’s own powers, but must have already been given from the Spirit and accepted, through him, in freedom. Indifference for what may happen is the pure counterpart of Mary’s readiness: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done unto me according to thy word.” Docility to the Spirit must always live from the docility of the Spirit himself. And this without prejudice to the infinite distance between God and creature, which places the creature as “servant” in the lowest place and in no way permits it to anticipate the thoughts and plans of the Lord or indeed to want to share the planning task with God. Rather, it must be an empty slate on which the chalk can draw what he wants and also at any time wipe away what no longer pleases him. If, however, the docility of the creature is this kind of submissiveness in the Spirit, the drawing at any given time will be that toward which the entire readiness of the human spirit had strained; the open expanse of its still indeterminate readiness will crystallize at precisely the spot which the word of God designates. This taut eagerness is a participation in the eternal spontaneity of the Spirit, who, as God’s power of invention, is inspired solely from the eternally given: from the love between Father and Son.

That divine receptivity and spontaneity can be alive at the center of our creaturely spirit, without alienating our own creaturely freedom or violently overwhelming it, rests on the presupposition made earlier: that God is never “something,” but “all,” and that the God of the Christian possesses within his almighty power the helplessness of loving surrender. If the Son’s (simple) receptivity to the Father (who utters him as “Word”) designates him to take flesh and become our brother—because, in order to be what the Creator adjudges us, we creatures receive our being from the Father in an analogous manner—, then the (double) receptivity of the Spirit (toward Father and Son) already presupposes the “existence” of the Son, and the Spirit is his adequate response to the begetter. In him he calls “Abba, Father,” just as the same Spirit is the voice of the Father to the Son: “Today I have begotten you, ... You are my beloved Son.” Precisely this twofold voice, breathed forth from the most intimate depths of both, is the spontaneous voice of the Spirit, as Spirit of the Father and of the Son. If we are creatures born again as children of God in the incarnate Son, the Holy Spirit proceeds from our most intimate personal center. Our spirit, set free to the freedom of God, achieves thus its most unique, unmistakable freedom. Both are true: we experience in the Holy Spirit “that we are children of God,” and we are such because we “are led by the Spirit of God” (Rom 8:14⁠-⁠16).

Now, however, our participation in the Spirit always remains conditioned by the Son sent to us by the Father, the Son of Man who dies on the Cross and rises from the dead, who—in order to demonstrate the Father’s love—forever pours himself out eucharistically to the Church. In this outpouring of self commissioned and acknowledged by the Father, he has gone “to the end of love” (John 13:1). He has, in the form of man, imparted his divine response to the Father who sent him, and in so doing (again, as man) has breathed out, transmitted, and released to his own the Spirit who accompanied his entire humanity and suffering. This is the foundation for the Christian “discernment of spirits”: “Beloved, trust not every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; for there are many false prophets come into the world. In this will you recognize the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God. And everyone which dissolves Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of Anti⁠-⁠Christ of whom you have heard that he is to come, and who is now already in the world” (1 John 4:1⁠-⁠3). What is decisive here is the sequence Incarnation⁠-⁠Spirit. And in the Incarnation John beholds always the Son who was delivered to the Cross by the Father for the sake of the world and was accredited by him through the Resurrection. Now the Spirit, who “proceeds from the Father” (John 15:26), whom the Father “will send us” (14:26), is certainly “Father⁠-⁠formative,” for in the Spirit we are indeed—by grace together with the Son—born again of the Father. But he is just as essentially “Son⁠-⁠formative,” not only because the Father sends him only at the “request” of the Son (14:16) “in my name” (14:26), nor only because the Son himself sends him from the Father (15:26), but because he is quite expressly the Spirit of the Son, who (as Word of the Father) “gives him without measure” in his fullness (John 3:34) as torrents of living water that flow from him when he is “glorified” (John 7:38f), who breathes forth the Spirit in death (John 18:30), in order to breathe him into the Church as he rises: “receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22).

The translation into the practical realm follows easily: the supreme guide is the unity of the Word of God pouring itself out (eucharistically unto death) with the Spirit who comes forth in this outpouring, and who is the real ratification, defense, and pneumatic exegesis of Jesus in his divine incarnate way of thinking (John 14:26, 15:26, 16:13⁠-⁠15). In this and in no other sense is Paul’s word to be understood: “The Lord is the Spirit” (2 Cor 3:17). In his flesh, Paul himself is always determined and driven by the Spirit, and, in surrendering himself “into the sufferings and death of Jesus” (2 Cor 4:10), he himself makes known whose Spirit it is that moves him. For this reason, whoever leaves behind the source of the Spirit, the Son, and seeks to “take a step forward,” separates the water from its source and has neither the Father nor the Son (2 John 9). For John, this “little progressive” (proagōn) is the real heretic who “dissolves Jesus.” That after or behind Christ there could come a kingdom or conduct proper to the Spirit, is indeed the ever recurring misinterpretation of the Christformativeness of the Spirit, as it has been propagated from the time of the Montanists down to the Joachimites, the Enlightenment, and the Idealists. With it comes a lack of appreciation for the inseparable unity of Trinity and Incarnation.

Everything is decided accordingly at the point where Christian and ecclesial spontaneity—in the invention of novel structures and contents of ecclesial life—holds itself in inner equipoise to the receptivity of the Spirit. This Spirit “bears witness to me, and you also (in a spirit of correspondence!) are to bear witness to me” (John 15:26⁠-⁠27). He “speaks not on his own authority” but “takes what is mine and declares it to you” (John 16:13⁠-⁠15). For what the Christian receives as the first fruits of his baptism—in his birth out of God—is conformity with the crucified Lord. We are baptized “unto his death,” and because we are dead and buried, must lead a life free from sin (Rom 6:1⁠-⁠2). Our resurrection with the Lord is here only spoken of in the future, even if the strength we receive—to live sinlessly—comes to us already from the Resurrection of Christ. We are “creatures from the dead” (ek nekrōn zōntas, Rom 6:13; zoein: to live). But the Spirit who is given to us is the Spirit breathed upon us with his dying breath: eternal life, from The Dead. From this point on, the discernment of spirits becomes concrete.

Concrete Discernment

The only man who is spiritually spontaneous is the man who lives also in a continuous receptivity: to his birth from the Father, to the image of the eucharistic Son, to the Spirit of both proceeding into our hearts with sighs and intercessions (Rom 8:26⁠-⁠27). The latter is the Spirit of childhood toward God and out of God, and in the same measure the Spirit of mature responsibility for mission (1 Cor 14:20). “Originality” and “obedience” are so little opposed that each rather calls forth and supports the other. Where one is visibly lacking the other is secretly infringed. Obedience is here, first of all, that submissiveness of the Spirit who lets himself arise (sich entspringen lässt) from Father and Son, i.e., from their entire concrete love as demonstrated in the Gospel, and who in turn seeks to be the Spirit of our mutual acquiescence. He is, first of all, the Spirit and mind of the Father, who begets the Son (entspringen lässt) from his own power of generation and who continues to nurture him in this Spirit as in a motherly womb; in this he is the archetype for our concrete love of neighbor, by reason of which we ought to be both father and mother to our fellowman. He is then the Spirit of the submissiveness of the incarnate Son toward his Father’s will, which is represented to him by the Holy Spirit. In this he is our prototype, showing how we too must be prepared to learn the will of God from the standpoint of our fellowmen. Founded on both, he is the ecclesial obedience which marks out all Christians as members of the body of Christ: “be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Eph 5:21), “in humility let everyone regard the other as better than himself” (Phil 2:3). This Spirit then demands that “you respect those who labor among you, who stand over you in the Lord and admonish you, esteeming them very highly in love because of their work” (1 Thess 5:12⁠-⁠13). This Spirit of submissiveness to God and man relieves the Christian of the pressing task of having to invent everything from the ground up with his own “creative imagination.” Rather, he has the opportunity to let the Spirit give himself, who is richer in invention than all creatures, and, “driven” by the Spirit (Mark 1:12, Rom 8:14), to co⁠-⁠invent the ever new, ever relevant Christian reality in world and history. He will then discover that in what God has handed over to the Church embryonically there lies infinitely more than what the Christian has discovered and lived, but that in every case this reality, which should be continually discovered anew, ultimately has its origin in the divine foundation. In this sense the otherwise misleading maxim is valid: nihil innovetur nisi quod traditum est.

 1. The tendency exists, in small groups that find themselves together naturally and spontaneously, to live Church anew and to experience its meaning: as community, which by mutual support and stimulation proves to be effective and fruitful at the point where a traditional parish in its inorganic public worship and pastorate remain unconvincing to itself and the surrounding world. The small group is not only livelier, but more imaginative: it finds in the blowing Spirit new and opportune tasks, and in the mutual stimulation of its members it elicits the initiative to carry through what is planned. The question for such groups is whether they are prepared to understand themselves as members of the Catholica and to align and transcend themselves toward this One and All that the Church of Christ must be, even in its visible earthly structure. For the Church is not only “one Spirit,” but also “one body” (Eph 4:4). On the basis of the one eucharistic surrender of Christ, which animates the group, the parish, and every local Church, we are indeed “all baptized by the one Spirit into one body,” in order to be “all saturated with the one Spirit” (1 Cor 12:13). The group is only a member of this body and is determined by the structural laws of the total organism: not primarily in the exteriority of an organization, but out of deeper necessities of the Spirit of God, who “apportions his gifts to everyone as he wills” (12:11) in the best interests of the whole body. The laws of charismata apply not only on the level of the individual, but on that of the group as well. For, as Paul amply develops them, they are always given from the point of view of the whole Church (Rom. 12, 1 Cor 13, Eph. 4). Thus, the genuineness of a charismatic group proves itself according to the measure of its readiness to transcend itself in the direction of the whole. Only then is it authorized to announce and practice its spontaneity within the whole and to accomplish this spontaneity according to the laws of proportion of the whole.

 2. There exists today the tendency toward definite Spirit⁠-⁠or pentecostal⁠-⁠churches, even within the Catholica, and these doubtless prove their identity by astonishing phenomena of spiritual renewal, by zeal in prayer, and readiness for apostolic engagement. Charismatic graces which resemble those of the primitive Church blossom in them and are often handled by them with genuine discretion. But even these churches must be subjected as a whole to the discernment of spirits, especially at the point where consciously or unconsciously a directness of spiritual experience is asserted or indeed strived for. We say it at the outset: essentially God can be experienced only by not experiencing. In the Christian realm: only by that decisive renunciation which lies in the Christian faith, hope, and love. Faith means: you, God, are right in every instance, even if I do not comprehend it or perhaps would like to hold the opposite. Hope means: in you, God, I alone have meaningful stability, and for this I abandon all self⁠-⁠affirmation. Love means: all my strength and my entire heart strains to affirm you, my God, and those men whom you have allotted to me as “neighbors” (and myself only in you). If from these three centrifugal movements something radiates back to me as confirmation, this does not belong to the meaning of the movement itself, and much less still will I carry out the movement for the sake of that confirmation. Things are much more paradoxical: the less one seeks himself and his experience, the sooner can such things fall to one’s share; the more, by contrast, he seeks his gratification, the less he receives it, or the experience becomes false from the Christian point of view. It is perhaps a spiritual excitement, a joyful enthusiasm, as can be found recorded in the history and psychology of religion in very many non⁠-⁠Christian religious gatherings. The classical “Rules for the Discernment of Spirits” handed down from the Pastor of Hermas via Origen, Anthony, Evagrius, and Diadochus to Bernard, Denis the Carthusian, and the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of LoyolaCf. «Discernement des Esprits», in Dict. de Spiritualité III (1957) Sp. 1222⁠-⁠1291 (Lit.), J. Mouroux, L’Expérience chrétienne. Paris 1952; Leo Bakker, Freiheit und Erfahrung, Redaktionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen über die Unterscheidung der Geister bei Ignatius von Loyola. Würzburg 1970. , point out again and again in the most diverse ways the refracted nature of such experience, which only achieves clarity at the point where the Christian man of prayer has reached a certain finality of disengagement from himself and his expectations of experience. After all, the Holy Spirit wants nothing else than to “form Christ” in us (Gal 4:19): but Christ “lives not to please himself” (Rom 15:3), “seeks not his own honor” and its enjoyment (John 5:41), “clings not to his form of God (and to his experience of God)” (Phil 2:6), became “poor” for our sake, not only materially, but above all in the Spirit, since he wanted to make us rich not materially, but in the Spirit (the Spirit of selfless giving! Cf. 2 Cor 8:9 and the entire context). The “doing without” (Entäusserung) characterizes the Son in his humiliation; in order to form us into his likeness, the Spirit trains us above all in this movement of descent: this will be the sign that authenticates the Church of Pentecost.

 3. Finally, there is the tendency to translate the content of Christian belief and the gifts given us by God into blessed concerns for the formation of the world: concern for peace, for social justice, for the assistance of under⁠-⁠developed peoples. According to many, the Spirit of Christ can only be identified where this translation into practice succeeds. In the sense of the discernment of spirits we can make the following comment: as long as the Christian is animated by the striving to give form to the Christian reality in the world, he is on the way of Christ. If, however, the success of this effort becomes the standard, he deviates from the true path. It may be useful here to recall the Old Testament criterion for true prophecy: the prophets of peace and prosperity spoke for the most part not from the Holy Spirit of God but from their own (Jer 28, Jer 23, Mich 3:5, Ezek 13:10⁠-⁠16). It was first and foremost the things no one desired that the prophet had to announce, on the strength of his own mission certainly, but also on the basis of the laws of salvation history. Even the richly successful signs and wonders which the prophets of peace effected failed to accredit them. Today, too, such signs of success can be a trial of the faithful by God (Deut 13:2⁠-⁠5). Again everything must pass through the fire of a fundamental renunciation, in order to be credible from a Christian standpoint: this was the meaning of Jesus’ temptations in the desert. The latter are also the Church’s essential, enduring temptations, whose seductive power Jesus wanted to experience from within, in order to assist the Church from within as she is tempted through the ages. All earthly goods, not least those touched by the technology of man, bear an ambivalence in themselves, in which the Christian intention may not concur. The technical means which are offered to simple, “underdeveloped” peoples manifestly cut both ways, even when they are introduced with foresight and responsibility. Up to a certain degree of culture they may prove beneficial, but through their inner dynamic they press beyond this level and lead the peoples without failure to the crises with which our cultures reverberate. All the more senseless appears the program frequently passed around today which would satisfy itself with development aid and the “human” way of thinking it expresses, and to forego real Christian mission. For only the values of faith could enable the peoples to halfway manage the dangerous “cultural values.” The Christian is summoned to make every effort to fight the misery of the world: war, hunger, immorality, despair. To expect a resounding success to his effort, however, would again be un⁠-⁠Christian. The freer mankind becomes from natural forces, the more it will be tempted to misuse the means which helped it to attain this freedom as instruments of power. With the mastery of the world there grows necessarily the apocalyptic world menace. It is out of the question that the Cross of Christ, which his Church is also enjoined to carry, could ever lose its relevance. Probably it will become more difficult than it was formerly to live as a Christian under the mammoth powers of the technical culture. Then it will be time to recall the traits of the Holy Spirit: that he arises in God out of a twofold eternal surrender, whose glory and exposure he is. Almighty power and vulnerability of love are not contradictory, just as the incarnation of this love, its crucifixion and resurrection do not cancel out, so long as the world exists and the Spirit reveals to it the mind of God.