The combination of the words “combat” and “spiritual” inevitably brings to mind one thing throughout the ages:
Why?
Between the bloodthirsty stories of the Old Testament, where the Israelites put to the sword “both man and woman, young and old, ox and sheep and donkey” (Joshua 6:21), and the military campaigns of the “Christian Europe” against the “infidels in the East” (including the Crusades, the Ottoman Empire, Turks, Lepanto, etc.) (*), there’s plenty of room for “spiritual battles”!
(*) (Sooner or later, I swear I’ll talk about the Crusades on the blog to try to debunk the usual nonsense you hear around…)
1 • Spiritual combat… but “against whom”?
A couple of years ago, Pope Francis reminded us that:
The Christian life is a constant battle.
(POPE FRANCIS, Apostolic Exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate, n.158)
And in one of the documents of the Second Vatican Council (which took place in the 1960s), we find this lofty phrase:
For a monumental struggle against the powers of darkness pervades the whole history of man. The battle was joined from the very origins of the world and will continue until the last day, as the Lord has attested. Caught in this conflict, b, nor can he achieve his own integrity without great efforts and the help of God’s grace.
(Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, n.37)
Mmmm… alright…
…but fight against whom?
Spiritual combat has nothing to do with Moors, Mamluks, or Wahhabism.
And no, it has nothing to do with arguing with atheists on the anti-clerical pages of Instagram and Facebook…
No.
In the letter he wrote to the Ephesians, Paul of Tarsus explains that:
For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood […].
(Ephesians 6:12)
…that is, paraphrasing, the battle is not “against people.”
Spiritual combat, on the other hand, is against sin, against vices, against the “three concupiscences,” against the “old man,” against the morbid attachment to one’s own ego, against what the ancients called “sclerocardia” (i.e. hardening of the heart); ultimately, against what John in the Apocalypse calls “the ancient serpent” (*) …
(*) (I promise that one day I will write a specific page about Him…)
2 • The “Ingredients” of Combat
It goes without saying, then, that spiritual combat takes place in the heart of man.
That is the battlefield.
To cut to the chase, the ingredients in this battle are three:
- intellect
- will
- God’s grace
For the combat to be effective, each of these must be “measured” precisely…
…since the existence of Christianity — roughly speaking — all the heresies that have occurred throughout history have been nothing more than an incorrect dosage of these three ingredients:
Vladimir Solov’ëv (1853-1900), Russian philosopher and theologian, wrote:
To truly set ourselves on the path of grace, intellectual knowledge is not enough. Asceticism is necessary, that is, the inner movement of the will: a person must inwardly struggle to receive within themselves the grace and strength of God.
(VLADIMIR SOLOV’ËV, The Spiritual Foundations of Life, Lipa, Rome 2014, p. 34)
What does this mean?
Solov’ëv continues:
This movement on the part of man, that is, his inner struggle, goes through three stages: first, a person must feel aversion to evil, feel and recognize evil as sin.
Secondly, a person must make an inner effort to reject evil and detach from it.
Thirdly, aware that they cannot save themselves from evil with their own strength, they must turn to divine help. Thus, to receive grace, three things are required of a person: aversion to moral evil as sin, effort to free oneself from it, and conversion to God.
(VLADIMIR SOLOV’ËV, The Spiritual Foundations of Life, Lipa, Rome 2014, p. 34)
3 • Narcissism Danger!
Many people have a somewhat distorted image of spiritual combat…
…and believe it coincides with the practice of self-harm, castration, or other more or less stoic forms of asceticism:
However, the purpose of this combat is not to show off muscles in a kind of spiritual narcissism.
It is not about proving (to oneself or others) how good we are at mastering our passions.
There is no ranking. The winner is not the one who strives the most.
The sense of this struggle is not self-assertion over our senses, but to love God above all things and, with the help of the Holy Spiri, to become more fully children of God, in the image of Jesus (each according to their own state of life, in the daily context in which they live… it is not about everyone becoming Franciscans or nuns!).
In this journey, it is normal to stumble and take some tumbles.
If it happens (and it does), it is perfectly normal; there is no need to feel guilty.
As Saint Francis de Sales (1567-1622) said:
It seems to me that all our fickleness comes from a single defect, namely that we forget the teaching of the saints about the need to consider ourselves at the beginning of our journey towards perfection every day. If we kept this in mind, in fact, we would not be surprised at all to see in ourselves some misery and even things to eliminate. It never ends; we must always start again with a good heart.
(SAINT FRANCIS DE SALES, Letter to St. Jane Frances de Chantal, March 12, 1615, quoted in Be Holy… in Joy, Itaca, Castel Bolognese (RA), 2018, p. 151)
The french saint goes on:
Let us not be troubled by our imperfections, for our perfection lies in combating them; and we could not fight them without seeing them, nor overcome them without encountering them.
Our victory is not in not feeling them, but in not consenting to them.
And consenting does not mean merely being disturbed by them. Often, for the exercise of our humility, it is necessary that we are wounded in this spiritual battle; in any case, we are never defeated unless we have lost either life or courage.
(SAINT FRANCIS DE SALES, Letter to St. Jane Frances de Chantal, March 12, 1615, quoted in Be Holy… in Joy, Itaca, Castel Bolognese (RA), 2018, p. 151)
Conclusione
In the same book I mentioned above, Solov’ëv also wrote:
If we truly want a free and perfect life, then we must entrust ourselves and abandon ourselves to Him who can free us from evil and give us the strength for good, to Him who eternally possesses freedom and perfection.
(VLADIMIR SOLOV’ËV, The Spiritual Foundations of Life, Lipa, Rome 2014, p. 37)
In short, Christianity has nothing to do with moralism, voluntarism, or stoicism.
sale
(Fall 2020)
- VLADIMIR SOLOV'ËV, I fondamenti spirituali della vita, Lipa, Roma 2014
- FRANCESCO DI SALES, Siate santi... nella gioia! Testi scelti per cristiani immersi nel mondo, Itaca : Oratorium, Castel Bolognese (RA) 2018
- MARKO IVAN RUPNIK, Il discernimento, Lipa, Roma 2004
- FËDOR DOSTOEVSKIJ, Memorie dal sottosuolo, Biblioteca Economica Newton, Roma 2005