Yoga in medieval western Christianity (December 1993)

[The following entry is from an article I wrote while at the ashram, for Shantivanam's 1993 “yearbook” publication:]

Yoga, the art of meditation, is a gift of India for all humanity. The yogis have discovered and refined numerous practices to aid in integrating flesh and spirit and interiorizing our experience of being in the world and time.

Many people, myself included, have asked why the West does not have its own yoga, why the Christian contemplative tradition has elaborated so few practical techniques of meditation. The answer, of course, is that, given the Christian emphasis on the role of divine grace in spiritual growth, Western contemplatives saw less need for the type of psycho-physical procedures used by India’s yogis. God’s grace would suffice to lead the meditator’s mind to a one-pointed focus on God.

However, Western Christianity did develop some methods of meditation, even before the famous Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. Perhaps the most important of these methods is the practice called lectio divina (“divine reading”). Its classic form is given in a letter by Guigo the Carthusian, written in the year 1150. Guigo’s method comprises four stages: Reading, Meditating, Invoking, and Contemplating.

The first stage, Reading, does not refer to the way we usually read a book today, even the Bible, in order to obtain information, knowledge, and entertainment. It does not require that we read the text from start to finish. Guigo’s Reading means to allow the eye to move slowly up and down the page, focusing now on one phrase, now on another.

In the second stage, we concentrate on one brief phrase, even just a word or two. In this stage of Meditating we seek a meaning beyond the literal sense of the word, a fuller and deeper sense of the text. Above all we find the whole in the least part, giving us a holographic vision of God’s teaching.

Then our attention shifts, spontaneously and gradually, from the words and their various levels of meaning to the divine presence within us. We begin to call on that presence, with spoken or mental words or even wordlessly. Sometimes the words we use in this stage of Invoking are the same words we have been reading in the text, but now they come from our heart as if they were our own words.

We reach the final stage, Contemplating, when our interior gaze rests lovingly and simply on God, forgetting the words of the text and our meditation upon it.

However simple it might seem, this method is quite demanding. It presupposes a serious effort on our part to understand the meaning of the sacred text, using even scholarly tools to the extent of our ability. We are warned to be mindful of the difference between mere fantasizing and the fuller sense of the word that lectio divina can give us. But the greatest challenge is to lift the word from the page and place it in our heart.

Guigo’s method of lectio divina is not original with him; its roots are deep in Christian, Jewish, and Greek traditions. More than a century before Guigo, St. Peter Damian, in chapter thirty-one of his Life of Blessed Romuald, describes a spiritual experience of the monastic reformer St. Romuald of Ravenna. The four stages of Master Romuald’s experience correspond perfectly to those of the classic lectio divina method.

Romuald is in a place called Parenzo (modern day Croatia), where he has just built a monastery with a group of disciples. He has accomplished his outward tasks, but he is in anguish for his lack of the “gift of tears,” the ability given to many monastic saints, in which the intensity of their prayer leads them to weep for joy and yearning for heaven. However hard he tries, Romuald can’t wring a single tear from his eyes.

Then one day, as he is singing the Psalms, Romuald’s attention remains fixed on the verse in which God says: “I will instruct you and teach you the way you should go; I will counsel you, with My eye upon you” (Psalm 32:8).

Instantly tears well up in his eyes, and his mind penetrates deep into the spiritual meaning of the words he has been reading. From then on, Romuald will be able to shed spiritual tears and see with his cleared inner vision the hidden meaning of Scripture.

On fire with love, Romuald cries out, “Dear Jesus, beloved Jesus, sweet delight of saints, bliss of angels…!” Then the Holy Spirit transforms his words into a chant of jubilation, beyond all human words and thoughts. St. Paul says, “We do not know how to pray as we ought, but God’s own Spirit intercedes for us, with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8:26).

Peter Damian’s story about Master Romuald seeking God in the Psalms unfolds according to the same four stages of lectio divina that Guigo will describe, more than a hundred years later. These stages are related to the four verbs in the saying of Jesus: “Seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7). Seek: Romuald is reading the Psalms and is seeking; he seeks not just the meaning of the words but rather the meaning of his existence in relation to God. He seeks to understand why his feelings remain cold and arid when he meditates. Find: then he finds a word of Scripture that speaks to his heart and responds to his seeking. He receives the “gift of tears” and the promise that God’s eye will be upon him and show him the way he must go. In other words, the deeper meaning that Romuald begins to find in the Scriptures is ultimately the sense of his own existence.

Romuald’s new understanding leads him to knock at God’s door. His knocking, his prayer, is the name of Jesus. He reaches the final stage when the door of contemplation opens, and his prayer dissolves into sighs too deep for words. Just as meditation leads into the prayer of invocation and gratefulness, so prayer leads beyond itself into that state where, as St. Antony Abbot (fourth century) said: “You truly pray when you no longer know that you are praying.”

This is the final step described in yoga texts as the passage from savikalpa samadhi to nirvikalpa samadhi, from a contemplation with mental acts to one without them, when “knower, knowing and known are one.”

Clearly, the spiritual practice implied in Peter Damian’s narrative of Master Romuald’s realization of God’s eye follows the path of bhakti yoga, as all Christian practice must. However, Romuald’s experience, leading as it does to silent jubilation and “divine unknowing,” is also the “royal way” (raja yoga), which includes the three ways of love, knowledge, and service.