Virtue gets the worst kind of press nowadays. 

I don’t mean that people think virtue is a bad thing. In fact, anywhere you turn you’re likely to find people praising virtue and wishing for more of it. On the theological and political right, you can read scathing denunciations of the decadence of modern living that plead for a return to the individual virtues that once made both church and state great. On the left, you will find no shortage of harangues against the greed of billionaires and the cynical complicity of the political class in robbing their working-class neighbors of their wealth and health. Surely what is needed is more of the honesty and compassion – the virtue – of working people, and less of the greed of the bourgeois class.  

Everyone wants more virtue, and there is no shortage of speech about how much more of it we need. There’s just one small problem, which is that almost no one is talking about what virtue actually is. 

You can probably name at least a few of the seven deadly sins: pride, anger, lust, sloth, gluttony, wrath, and envy. But how many of the seven heavenly virtues can you name off the top of your head? 

Virtue gets the worst kind of press. Its substance is forever ignored even as its name is vainly invoked as a counter to whichever of its more-famous cousins, the vices, have earned the current speaker’s ire.  

The present situation is especially strange because Christian saints and thinkers have a rich tradition of reflecting on the seven virtues: prudence (one’s ability to see the consequences of one’s choices and act accordingly), temperance (the ability to regulate one’s emotions and desires), courage, justice, faith, hope, and love. Whole tomes have been written on what each of these virtues means, and how to know when you have attained one of them. 

Just as much has been written about how one attains these virtues in the first place. If most of us were asked, “How do I become a more temperate person?” I suspect we’d struggle to find an answer. Some of us might think of a self-help podcast or a TED talk about personal growth, others might suggest therapy, and still others might advise the questioner to pray for virtue and let God do the rest. Yet Christian authorities, both ancient and modern, would give a very different sort of reply. They would focus on the questioner’s daily life and the balance between corporate prayer, personal prayer, and sacramental participation. They would discuss self-discipline and the need for accountability and compunction. They would talk frankly about the importance of discernment of spirits, the time-honored practice of examining one’s thoughts and feelings to determine which come from God, which from oneself, and which from the soul’s enemies. They would inquire what, if any, images the questioner used in prayer, or whether they simply rested in a silent, imageless enjoyment of God’s presence. 

There is a name for this kind of spiritual-theological investigation: ascetical theology. The word “ascetical” derives from the Greek askesis, which can be translated as training or exercise, and often carries athletic connotations. Ascetical theologians take the comparisons between athletic training and the spiritual life very seriously; after all, St. Paul himself compared the Christian life to a race (1 Cor. 9:24-27). Just like fitness (or wellness, if you prefer that language), every Christian can grow spiritually, but that growth will only happen through serious effort and guided training. Ascetical theology is no more or less than the accumulated wisdom of two millennia of reflecting on different patterns of spiritual formation. 

If Christianity has a rich tradition of ascetical theology, where did it go? And why have so few modern Christians heard of it?

While a full history would take far more space than this essay allows, there are three basic reasons for this neglect. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Christians have chosen to denigrate ascetical theology by ignoring it, rejecting it, or redirecting its energy.

Of these three methods, ignorance is the most common. As Christianity has retreated from the public sphere, the average worshipper has fewer and fewer opportunities for Christian formation. Religious leaders assume that the stressed out, time-starved denizens of the 21st century have no energy for studying and following rigorous ascetical demands. Moreover, those leaders are starved for time and energy as well, and may well have neglected their own spiritual growth. In an era when many church leaders are desperately laboring to keep their buildings open, spending time on growth in prayer and virtue can seem like a luxury we can ill afford.

While ignorance might be the most common response to ascetical theology, its rejection has the largest consequences. Ascetical theology has, for better or for worse, typically been known only to the knowledge-keepers of the church: seminary faculty, bishops, and influential priests. Over the past sixty years, mainline Protestantism’s knowledge-keepers have largely shifted our understanding of pastoral care away from the classical idea of “cure of souls” (and a corresponding responsibility for parishioners’ moral state) and towards the care and tending of emotional systems. At its worst, the emotional model of pastoral care turns the minister into little more than a poorly trained therapist, capable of listening and reflecting a parishioner’s feelings but not of changing character patterns – a skill that even the best therapists must spend decades developing. At its best, this model allows priests to hold disparate groups of people together in the midst of significant disintegrative pressures, but it offers little guidance for helping them grow in virtue. Ascetical theology, with its practical demands and detailed formulae, is bound to cause emotional friction of precisely the sort that many pastors have been trained to avoid. It also does not help that the most recent luminaries of Anglican ascetical theology – Martin Thornton and F. P. Harton – are male, British, and Anglo-Catholic. In a church culture more attuned than ever (thank God!) to the impacts of oppression, representation, and privilege, there are very real questions about how much of our Anglican ascetical heritage needs to be decolonized.

The good news is that ascetical theology can be retrieved and decolonized; the urgent news is that it must be retrieved and decolonized. Our ancient practices of soul formation and growth in virtue are simply too important to consign to the dustbin of history. These practices can revive individuals’ faiths, recenter dying churches in mission and worship, and empower people and communities to engage in the liberative work we are commanded to do. 

In fact, these practices are so central to Christian faith that they have not been abandoned so much as redirected, reinvented, or forgotten and rediscovered, by the church. The burgeoning field of spirituality studies is evidence of this. Scholars, priests, and spirituality gurus write book after book exploring Ignatian spirituality, lectio divina, centering prayer, labyrinth walking, and more. As globalization has allowed the Christian East and West more communication than ever before (to say nothing of the rise of syncretic practices that draw inspiration from Buddhist meditation, Jewish mysticism, or Hindu rituals!), the average believer probably has more practices available to her than ever before. What is missing is the systematic view provided by ascetical theology, which organizes these disparate practices through a theoretical framework that can create detailed, reliable, appropriately individualized plans for spiritual growth. 

Throughout the church, leaders bemoan a crisis of formation. Even amid the riches of the Information Age, Christians seem to know less about their faith than previous generations. Even more troubling, Christians often seem obtuse to the demands their faith makes upon them to act for justice, share their goods with the poor and needy, and to grow in faith, hope, and love. Surely it is not a coincidence that we are complaining of a crisis of spiritual formation after having forgotten the very branch of theology that deals with spiritual formation! 

Some years ago, a priest told me this story. A woman came into his office saying that her prayers had gone dry and she found no consolation in her faith anymore. She told him, “I think I’m having a dark night of the soul.” The priest, who had some training in ascetical theology, suspected there was more to the story. The dark night of the soul is a very rare event, and is not known to happen in the stage of growth this woman was in. So the priest began to inquire about her life and quickly discovered that her problem was not a dark night, but anger. She was the sort of person who enjoyed being offended, and had recently been snapping at other parishioners. They worked together on her anger, and saw real spiritual progress; she became a much gentler person in a short period of time. How much wasted time was avoided because this priest knew the right questions to ask! And how much better is the church because one of its members learned to master her anger? Ascetical theology, rightly applied, can offer precisely these benefits: real growth in Christ, informed and speeded along by the wisdom of past spiritual guides. 

Virtue gets the worst sort of press these days, but it doesn’t have to. All across the world, faithful Christians are earnestly striving to grow into the image of Jesus Christ by patterning their lives on his virtues and remaining faithful in their prayers. When this work bears fruit, it can reinvigorate struggling churches and bring new life to souls. It’s time to refocus our churches on spiritual growth – not as an afterthought or an ad-hoc collection of practices, but as the central disciple-making ministry Jesus commissioned us for. It’s time to reclaim ascetical theology.