Introduction
In recent decades, the designation “spiritual but not religious” has come to represent a growing number of people who are interested in spirituality, but who do not subscribe or assent to any particular religion. In the United States, for example, the current number of adults over the age of eighteen in this category is estimated to be 22 percent, almost a quarter of the overall population.Footnote 1 This article develops a pastoral approach that might enrich the church’s response to those who assume this designation. Though written from an American Catholic perspective, the ideas presented here may be of value to other Christian denominations, as well as to churches in other countries.
We will begin with the Pew Research Center’s 2023 survey entitled “Spirituality Among Americans.”Footnote 2 The findings from this survey reveal what people mean when they describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” The analysis also reveals distinctions and clarifications not immediately evident in the designation. We will then examine documents from two recent Synods of the Roman Catholic Church that express the church’s acknowledgment of this growing demographic and indicate an initial pastoral response.
After these preliminary observations, three ideas are engaged to construct a theological paradigm designed to encourage, elaborate, and support a substantial pastoral response. The first concept retrieves ideas from the 1991 Vatican document Dialogue and Proclamation: Reflection and Orientations on Interreligious Dialogue and the Proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.Footnote 3 It describes “four forms of dialogue” that delineate different kinds of conversations among members of different religions in their quest for mutual understanding and respect. This article appropriates and adapts those four forms of interreligious dialogue for conversation with those who value spirituality but who do not identify with any particular religion.
The second idea draws upon the hermeneutical theory of the twentieth-century German philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer. Although not religious in a conventional sense, he provides an early and erudite example of the contemporary spiritual but not religious person. We will examine components of his hermeneutics to elucidate the dynamics of encounter across difference, specifically the differences between observant Catholics and those who seek to live a spiritual life outside the church or any religious community.
The third idea is an exercise in theological ressourcement, a look back at Christian history to discover what from the past might be relevant for the church today. Specifically, we will look at selected passages from the fourth- and fifth-century writings of Saint Augustine of Hippo to glean from his theology and pastoral practice some insights for a contemporary response to spiritual but not religious persons. Augustine’s complex spiritual journey and his awareness of religious and philosophical difference shaped the ways in which he proclaimed the Gospel. Likewise, the political turmoil and cultural flux of fifth-century Roman North Africa influenced his pastoral ministry and informed his theological writings. Thus his thought is surprisingly relevant to contemporary religious and spiritual ferment.
In reading Augustine for this purpose, we will reprise Gadamer’s hermeneutical theory to account for the saint’s own time, place, and assumptions, even as we study his thought for theological insight and pastoral empathy that can enrich the church’s response to the contemporary spiritual but not religious phenomenon.
Understanding Spiritual but Not Religious: The Pew Survey
The 2023 Pew Research Center Survey “Spirituality Among Americans” was the first by the organization to focus on the spiritual but not religious phenomenon. It explored and measured attitudes of Americans toward religion and spirituality. The study, conducted from July to August 2023, found that 22 percent of Americans identified as spiritual but not religious, 21 percent as neither spiritual nor religious, and 58 percent identified with an organized religion.Footnote 4 However, it also found that the nature or extent of the spiritual but not religious demographic was not so clear and distinct. The designation can mean many different things, even among those who claim it as their own. In fact, both of the descriptive terms in the designation—spiritual and religious—carry different meanings for different people and both admit a wide variety of interpretations.Footnote 5
Recognizing the ambiguities in terminology, the researchers decided to take a more inductive approach. Instead of providing a prescriptive definition of spiritual, and telling respondents what it meant, they asked people to express in their own words what they understood by the term. They found that “being connected” was the most common descriptor of spirituality. Respondents mentioned many different types of connections. To be spiritual is to be in touch with something bigger than myself, with God, with my true self, with nature, with a religious faith, with other people, with a set of beliefs I make for myself, or with loved ones who have passed.Footnote 6 These variations on the theme of connectedness were not always discrete categories, but often were interrelated in the lives of the respondents. Some responders, however, identified one of them as the singular and determinate feature of their spiritual life.
There is also ambiguity around the term “religion.” It is not always clear what if any level of religious disaffection or disaffiliation might be implied by “but not religious” tag. Responses showed that elements of doctrine, morality, and devotion persist in the spiritual life and practice of many people who do not necessarily identify with a religious tradition. Many spiritual but not religious persons retain spiritual beliefs and practices from their religion of origin.Footnote 7 For example, a person may continue to believe in basic Christian teachings about God, Jesus Christ, the soul, afterlife, and so on, while rejecting particular passages or interpretations of Scripture, or doctrines about heaven and hell. They may treasure the role of Mary and Marian devotion, but feel alienated from what they experience as a patriarchal church. Because they do not accept all Christian doctrines, they self-identify as spiritual but not religious. Moral teachings can also lead people to default to “not religious” depending on how they approach religious and cultural arguments about issues of health care, immigration, distribution of resources, capital punishment, and so forth.
The survey found that the majority of persons who identify with this designation because they reject particular doctrinal or moral teachings also abandon regular religious worship and rarely participate in religious services. However, many continue to use religious artifacts and symbols, such as medals, crosses, rosaries, bibles, and so forth.Footnote 8 In fact, what is more surprising, 45 percent of those who identify as spiritual but not religious nonetheless continue to claim a “religious affiliation,” perhaps in deference to their personal or family history (21 percent of Protestants; 12 percent of Catholics).Footnote 9 Just as the term “spiritual” can mean many different things for different people, the term “religious” is also fluid in the vernacular and does not follow institutional standards of church membership.Footnote 10
Despite these ambiguities, the researchers at Pew conclude that the number of Americans who identify as spiritual but not religious is growing. Subsequent research by Pew found that the percentage of those who reject religion altogether has grown from 18 percent in 2014 to 28 percent in 2024.Footnote 11
The Emergence of Spiritual but Not Religious in Synods of the Catholic Church
As mentioned previously, 12 percent of spiritual but not religious Americans consider themselves “affiliated” with Catholicism, despite their “not religious” label. The number of Americans who have left the Catholic Church is difficult to determine. The Catholic share of the overall American population dropped from about 24 percent in 2007 to about 21 percent in 2014, but has held relatively steady in recent years.Footnote 12 As of 2021, about 21 percent of US adults still describe themselves as Catholic.Footnote 13 Despite this relatively stable percentage, and the overall growth in raw numbers, the church has one significant reason for concern. Surveys also show that those who leave the Catholic Church, including Catholics who move toward spiritual but not religious, are much more likely to be youth and young adults.Footnote 14
Concern for the church’s relationship with young Catholics, not only in America but around the world, led Pope Francis to dedicate the 2018 Synod of the Church to the theme “Young People, The Faith and Vocational Discernment.”Footnote 15 The first step in this synodal process was to listen to young people’s concerns, questions, and suggestions. Three hundred young adults participated in this consultative process, traveling to Rome in March 2018. Another fifteen thousand participated online. The in-person and online participants represented many countries and twenty different language groups. Their collaboration resulted in a seven-thousand-word preliminary document that expressed their hopes and concerns. It was called the Final Document from the Pre-Synodal Meeting, published in March 2018.Footnote 16
The language in this Vatican document is remarkably similar to that found in the 2023 Pew Survey of Americans. The Vatican document affirmed that “lots of young people, having lost trust in institutions, have become disaffiliated with organized religion and would not see themselves as ‘religious.’ However, young people are open to the spiritual.”Footnote 17 In their own voice, the young people who collaborated to write this document claimed that “religion is no longer seen as the main stream through which a young person searches for meaning.”Footnote 18 They also express their disagreement about some of the church’s teachings on sexual morality and healthcare issues. Some claim that the church even increases the distance between them and Jesus.Footnote 19
Despite such reservations and disagreements, these young people still want to be part of the church.Footnote 20 That desire was evidenced in their willingness to participate in the synodal process and their hope to be heard and accepted by the church and its leaders. At the same time, they are aware that many of their peers have left the church and do not participate in any ecclesial conversations with institutional leaders. They remain spiritual but distance themselves from Catholicism or from religion in general.
The document goes on to describe the situation with more language similar to that found in the Pew report. “There are many young people who relate to God solely on a personal level, who are ‘spiritual but not religious,’ or focused only on a relationship with Jesus Christ … and see the Church as irrelevant.”Footnote 21 “Young people,” the document proclaims, “are looking for companions on the journey,” for a mentor “who constantly seeks holiness,” is “a confidant without judgment,” and who acknowledges their humanity.Footnote 22 Yet so often what they find in the church are religious leaders who exhibit little or no pastoral concern, and others who seem “disconnected and more focused on administration than community-building.”Footnote 23
A second document emerged from this 2018 Synod on Youth and Young Adults. It was the post-synodal document, composed after the general assembly of bishops in October of that same year.Footnote 24 This document expressed the bishops’ concerns about the issues raised by the youth themselves, with references such as “the desire for life in love and the healthy restlessness that is found in the hearts of young people.”Footnote 25 This document, however, published after the bishops had read and discussed the pre-synodal document, describes the tendency of young people to psychologize spirituality, that is, they “search for psychological well-being rather than [have an] openness to encounter with the Mystery of the living God” and to practice a “certain syncretism,” that is, they “see religion as a private matter” and a choice of elements “from a variety of spiritual traditions.”Footnote 26 Put side by side, the pre-synodal and post-synodal documents reveal somewhat different concerns and agendas. The young people who contributed to the pre-synodal document made themselves vulnerable through their questions and concerns. They asked to be heard. The church’s official response in the post-synodal document does not appear to hear them, mixing pastoral empathy with ecclesial fears and intimating precipitous pastoral judgments that could foreclose future conversation.
More recently, Pope Francis called another synod on the whole question of what it means to be a church that listens, a “synodal church.” The final document of this most recent synod, which began in 2021 and was completed in 2024, referenced the 2018 Synod on Youth. It affirmed in positive language the contribution of young people to the life of the church. The 2024 synodal document directly addressed young Catholics and sought to “assure them thoughtful and patient accompaniment; in particular, the proposal of ‘an experience of accompaniment in view of discernment.’”Footnote 27 It thanked them for their contribution to the 2018 Synod and said that their contribution “deserves to be revisited and taken up again.”Footnote 28 This 2024 document also emphasized the importance of spirituality in the church’s effort to become a church that listens to its members and emphasizes the importance of accompanying one another and especially young people in their spiritual discernment.Footnote 29
Pope Leo XIV has repeatedly expressed his intention to continue Pope Francis’s vision for a synodal church. Leo envisions a church that listens to and accompanies the faithful in discerning together how to live an evangelical life amid contemporary challenges and opportunities.Footnote 30 To support that vision, the paradigm developed in this article proposes three critical components necessary for pastoral sensibility and synodal response not only to young Catholics, but to all who have abandoned institutional religion, or believe it has abandoned them, and who at some level identify as spiritual but not religious. The next three sections of the paper develop each of these three components in turn. The first section, building on the Vatican document Dialogue and Proclamation, identifies and elaborates the likely settings or occasions of such pastoral encounter; the second enlists Gadamer’s practical philosophical counsel about fruitful dialogue across difference; and, the third integrates insights from Saint Augustine of Hippo about the ubiquity of God’s Word and the agency of divine grace in the human quest for wisdom and happiness.
Four Occasions for Conversation about Religion and Spirituality
In 1991, the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue issued a document entitled Dialogue and Proclamation: Reflection and Orientations on Interreligious Dialogue and the Proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.Footnote 31 The document is an extensive summary of the church’s decades of theological reflection on its relationships with other religions. It also suggests practical ways to continue and deepen dialogue among the world’s great religions,
Specifically, the document outlines four forms of dialogue, four contexts or occasions within which dialogue across religious difference is likely to take place.Footnote 32 These four are: 1) the dialogue of life, in which people strive to live in an open and neighborly spirit, sharing their daily joys and sorrows, their persistent human problems and preoccupations; 2) the dialogue of action, in which people from various religious backgrounds work together for justice and peace, collaborating for the integral development and liberation of peoples; 3) the dialogue of theological exchange, in which, with the help of scholars and specialists, people strive to deepen their understanding of various religious traditions, and to appreciate one another’s teachings and values; and, 4) the dialogue of religious experience, in which people share their spiritual lives, their experience of prayer and contemplation, and their seeking for the Holy One.
These four occasions for dialogue neither have priority of order nor are they discrete and separate. In real life, they often integrate and combine. The distinctions remain useful because they signal various kinds of pastoral opportunities that arise as members of different religious communities encounter one another and naturally engage in dialogue about their lives, hopes, and dreams. The dialogue of life emerges in ordinary places like work, family gatherings, neighborhood relations and so forth, where quotidian concerns bring us together. As trust builds, people may eventually talk about the religious dimensions of their cultural or family heritage. Witnessing moments of crisis or sharing times of personal or familial stress can become surprising invitations for mutual learning and respect, enriched by religious difference.
The dialogue of action involves working together for peace and social justice. Such efforts not only serve to improve social conditions and meet the needs of others, but they can also become occasions to talk about the religious motivations behind our commitment to such action. An off-hand conversation while working together in a neighborhood community program becomes an opportunity for quiet discovery of how the values espoused by a person’s religion have led to a commitment to social justice. While working alongside persons from other religious traditions on a social project, colleagues may be invited to share how their religious life inspires their dedication to this work. Thus the dialogue of action can lead to reflection on action, and in turn deepen our mutual respect for and awareness of one another’s values.
The third and fourth forms of dialogue describe conversations that are more focused. A dialogue of (formal) theological exchange is most often a planned event designed for intentional learning from and listening to one another across religious difference. Such structured, formal conversations about theology and ethics, while less frequent than the first form of dialogue, dialogue in daily life, and social cooperation, can be pivotal points in interreligious dialogue and understanding.
The dialogue of religious experience goes beyond formal teaching and practice to shared reflection on how religion impacts one’s interior life. It is dialogue that moves from tradition to transcendence, from institutional injunction to spiritual immanence. Such exchange is a precious meeting at deeper levels of the self and soul. Like theological dialogue, it may occur in more formal settings and arranged occasions. The international conferences of Buddhist and Christian monks and nuns in the mid-twentieth century evoke powerful memories of interfaith sharing of spiritual experience across religious traditions. Or, by contrast, this kind of deep sharing can emerge quietly during the simpler, everyday conversations that enrich the dialogue of life, or they can become part of earnest explorations of spirituality amid the dialogue of action among people from different religions who dedicate themselves to service of society.
One of the most well-known participants in the mid-twentieth century dialogues of religious experience was the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton.Footnote 33 His many writings on the spiritual life drew the attention of Catholics and Christians from many denominations, as well as readers from Eastern religions. His readership expanded beyond monks and nuns to include laypeople and eventually reached those who did not belong to any religion. Merton made note of this development. In the fifth edition of Seeds of Contemplation, published in 1961 as New Seeds of Contemplation, he wrote in the preface: “There are perhaps people without formal religious affiliations who will find in these pages something that appeals to them.”Footnote 34 Since that prescient comment, the number of people outside any religious tradition who are nonetheless interested in spirituality has grown significantly, as we have seen. They seek to participate in dialogues about spiritual experience. Their desire deserves a pastoral response that might be found in the reenvisioning of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue’s four forms of interreligious dialogue as four possible forms of interspiritual dialogue.
To that end, we can reprise and repurpose the four forms of dialogue outlined in Dialogue and Proclamation as occasions for dialogue between “religious persons” and “spiritual but not religious persons.” Such inclusive dialogues become opportunities to explore together the deeper levels of our common humanity and spiritual nature. The exigencies of daily life, serendipitous encounters occasioned by social responsibility, and theological conferences as well as organized discussions about spiritual experience all present opportunities for religious persons and spiritual but not religious persons to listen carefully to one another and benefit from one another’s perspectives.
But it is not sufficient simply to appropriate and enumerate the four kinds of interreligious dialogue for a pastoral response to the spiritual but not religious phenomenon. Further steps are needed to build a robust pastoral practice that welcomes and engages those who in one way or another eschew religion. Participants in dialogue between members of different religions make certain assumptions about one another. Despite the differences between and among their various religious traditions, participants assume that their dialogue partners find meaning, purpose, guidance, and wisdom in their respective traditions. Their particular spiritual lives arise from, are expressed through, and are supported by the teachings and practices of their religious communities. However, such assumptions about the congruence of religion and spirituality do not necessarily apply when one’s dialogue partners include spiritual but not religious persons. For them adherence to and sustained participation in a religious community is not part of their chosen spiritual path.
Two further elements help build a pastoral paradigm that accounts for the significant difference between spiritualities practiced within a religious tradition and those that are not. We turn first to the thought of the twentieth-century philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer and his insights into conversation across difference. Gadamer’s hermeneutics serve to acclimate the four forms of interreligious dialogue to the exigencies of pastoral conversation with spiritual but not religious persons.
Gadamer’s Hermeneutics for Conversations about Spiritual but Not Religious
Hans Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics offers insights about how to engage in productive conversations across difference.Footnote 35 His ideas offer guidance that the church can use as it seeks to practice “thoughtful and patient accompaniment” with spiritual seekers, as stated in its 2024 Synod document.
A common notion about open conversations with people who come from other backgrounds, or who hold beliefs different from our own, is that all participants in the conversation need to put aside their assumptions, beliefs, and worldview. The presumptive ideal is to be as objective as possible and to shed all of one’s assumptions and convictions in order to understand the other as clearly as possible. Such well-intentioned attempts at listening with an open mind and heart assume that we can and should do so apart from our own experience and commitment.
In the context of this article, this approach would mean religious persons should strive to suspend or mitigate their faith, devotion, and practice in order to understand others whose spirituality is lived outside religious commitment. It would advise that believers should enter an imaginative process in which they put aside their faith and practice for the benefit of the nonreligious persons they are trying to understand. Likewise, it would mean that spiritual but not religious persons would have to drop their disaffection with religion and approach it objectively, without any influence from their own past experiences of religion, positive or negative, or to temporarily suspend their conviction that organized religion is an irrelevant relic.
Gadamer would consider such an approach unwise and, in any event, impossible. His hermeneutical theory holds that it is naive to expect to achieve a clear, distinct, and objective understanding of another person’s experience, inoculated against any contamination from our side. This assumption of imagined objectivity, he warns, betrays the lingering effects of Enlightenment thinking. Openness to another, who is different by virtue of background or conviction, writes Gadamer, “involves neither ‘neutrality’ concerning content nor extinction of one’s self, but the foregrounding and appropriation of one’s fore-meaning and prejudices.”Footnote 36 As such, his hermeneutics is not a method for achieving an idealized, objective empathy. It is rather a call to a cognizant admission of our own position, and the multiple reasons behind it, both rational and affective. We become more capable of understanding the other when we are as honest and mindful as we can be about the dynamics of our own position. This careful effort of self-awareness and exercise of revelatory introspection paves a more productive way for negotiating difference for mutual benefit.
Note his use of the term “prejudices” in the aforementioned quotation and his claim that we need not excise them but “foreground” them. By prejudice (Vorurteil in German), Gadamer does not mean the common, vernacular understanding of “opinion formed without judgment.”Footnote 37 We commonly speak of prejudices against a particular race, nation, religion, or some other social, cultural, or language group. This understanding of prejudice emphasizes irrational resistance to reform and revision of ideas and attitudes when exposed to new information. This kind of prejudice needs to be both acknowledged and eliminated as far as possible, if conversation across difference is to be a fruitful exercise.
Gadamer is speaking about something else. His understanding of prejudice is more subtle. He uses the German word Vorurteil to account for the fact that all the elements of our experience are constituent parts of our self. Language, tradition, intellectual influences, education, social position, embodiment, sexual identification, family and health history, religious stance, and any other component of our accumulated experience—all such factors are part of who we are. These manifold layers of meaning and understanding comprise our “self” in all its complexity and on all the levels of our being. We cannot ignore “who we are” in how we negotiate encounters with other selves who are different from “our” self.Footnote 38
We cannot help but bring who we are into our encounters with people whose convictions and decisions differ from ours. How we have named and understood our own experience in the past remains part of any confrontation with new ideas or new information, be they from a book or a person, a culture or a conviction that is alien to us. We cannot interpret or understand otherness without activating the cultural framework in which we live, the philosophical, religious or spiritual assumptions that shape our worldview, and the psychological dynamics that make us who we are. Culture, worldview, and personal identity, insists Gadamer, are not only inevitably at work when we meet and engage the unfamiliar. They are essential dynamics in the intellectual sorting and resorting that comprise active understanding and interpretation. Context, history, and experience are the lens through which we perceive everything. We cannot escape them. We cannot eliminate the categories within which we receive and process our experience of others and of the world.
Gadamer’s practical philosophical counsel is that we “foreground” them. We should strive to become aware of the prejudices (in his sense of the term) that accompany us as we enter into any effort to understand the experience of another person, community, or tradition. His hermeneutics require an asceticism that confesses one’s own assumptions and understandings, and endeavors to stay receptive to the experience of the other, however similar to or different from our own. The willingness to name, as far as we can, the fore-meanings and prejudices that we inevitably bring into conversation makes possible what Gadamer calls a “fusion of horizons.”Footnote 39 Successful conversations across difference produce a completely new way of looking at the world, a new interpretation. “The conversation has a spirit of its own … the language used in it bears its own truth within it, that is … it reveals something which henceforth exists.”Footnote 40 In dialectic engagement enriched by the confession of prejudices and openness to difference, conversation partners together create a new reality, conceived in their mutual vulnerability and honesty, and induced in the creative integration of their different worldviews. Such conversations can indeed lead to new awareness and appreciation of the experience of the other in light of the new horizon created together.Footnote 41
How does one achieve a fusion of horizons when the dialectic is about the relationship between religion and spirituality? The rejection of religion, in whole or in part, may strike a devout believer as dismissive and indolent. Concomitantly, the spiritual but not religious person may find the religious adherent resistant to alternative interpretations of spirituality or insensitive to judgments imposed and perpetuated by religion.
Conversations between religious adherents and spiritual but not religious persons hold more promise when all parties practice the internal vigilance and discernment of self-awareness, recommended by Gadamer’s hermeneutical theory. On one side of the conversation, those whose spirituality is integrated with religious faith and practice become better conversation partners when they take the time to reflect on how that happens for them and what it has meant to them throughout their lives. If they confess this prejudice to themselves and explore how their faith is a constituent part of their very self, their religion emerges amid conversation less as disembodied doctrine or moral imposition and more as a life-giving source of meaning. If in the course of dialogue they share these insights with their nonreligious conversation partners, the ambience is more likely to allow difference without dismissiveness.
On the other side are those who find religion to be at least irrelevant or at most harmful for their spiritual lives. They also best prepare for these conversations by confessing how and why this is the reality of their lives. Introspective review of how they have arrived at their own standpoint will enrich how they present their own existential dynamics to their more religious companions. That authenticity helps nurture an environment wherein the religious person is less likely to default to disapproval and more likely to remain open to learning from a different experience of religion or spirituality.
Thoughtful review and confession of one’s prejudices increases self-awareness. Such internal mindfulness and honesty prepare the mind and heart for dialogue across difference. More often than not, this preparatory self-awareness will deepen during dialogue itself. Mutual attentiveness and exploration of prejudices continue to expand the horizons of the participants. Such conversation brings the borders of one’s own horizon of meaning into bold relief and invites everyone to risk crossing those borders in order to explore the uncharted territory where their dialogue partner dwells.
The value of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is its invitation into the complexity of cultural, philosophical, linguistic, and psychological factors that lie behind what a person means when they identify as religious or as spiritual but not religious. The willingness to own those factors and to engage them appropriately in the effort to remain open to the other is at the heart of conversation across difference. Gadamer’s hermeneutical theory helps the participants to avoid two extremes. One extreme is a claim to absolute truth and a felt need to convert the other to your position. The other extreme is a surrender to relativism, an assumption that different religious beliefs and spiritual practices are all basically the same. That stance ultimately devalues the convictions and commitments of both conversation partners as accidental results of random social, historical, and psychological factors or the cultural expressions thereof.Footnote 42
Gadamer’s counsel about conversation across difference deepens dialogue. It helps ensure that the four forms of dialogue previously identified become occasions of fruitful encounters, opportunities to build bridges across the divide between members of religious communities and those who abstain from religion but espouse spirituality. Gadamer’s hermeneutics surface the currents that churn beneath dialogue across difference and help us navigate what can be challenging waters. When participants identify, admit, and embrace the complexity of their respective convictions, they are more likely to channel them in ways that nourish mutual understanding, respect, and learning.
Saint Augustine of Hippo’s Contributions to Spiritual Accompaniment
The final component for this effort to enrich pastoral response to spiritual but not religious persons comes from the early centuries of Christian thought. Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430) can provide further theological insight and spiritual depth for today’s conversations across spiritual and religious difference. Augustine’s theology is obviously a religious spirituality, founded on his Christian belief in the mystery of the Word made flesh in Christ. But, as we shall see, it is his faith in the eternal Word of God that enriched his pastoral practice and can benefit the church today.
Before we explore his theology and spirituality, we must first address the differences between Augustine and ourselves. We easily expect to find differences between Augustine and contemporary spiritual but not religious persons. However, we should also allow for differences between Augustine and contemporary Christians. Given the significant religious, linguistic, cultural, and other differences between our twenty-first-century global church and Augustine’s fourth- to fifth-century Mediterranean Christianity, we would be wise to employ Gadamer’s hermeneutical injunctions in order to account for those differences. The historical gaps—even chasms—between late Roman antiquity and our post-Enlightenment, postmodern, science-oriented era are not easily traversed. We have to listen with care and caution to someone like Augustine as we seek to locate the signal of his distant voice and reduce the static at both his end and ours. Gadamer’s hermeneutical theory originated precisely in questions about how to engage with ancient texts such as Augustine’s writings.
Despite a common faith, twenty-first-century Christians cannot assume a shared ambit of discrete “prejudices” common to themselves and Augustine. The temptation to domesticate Augustine for our own contemporary purposes, theological or otherwise, comes up against the strange and even alien nature of the world of the early church and the society it inhabited.Footnote 43 Nonetheless, Augustine’s theological and philosophical genius beckons us to inquire among his writings for any wisdom they might add to our theological quest to pastoral dialogue with spiritual but not religious persons and to be open to his criticism of our assumptions.
Engagement with Augustine’s thought in this article will focus on two selections from his writings, specifically his “Letter 102” and passages from his book Instructing Beginners in the Faith (De Catechizandis Rudibus). The hope is that a careful reading of these selected passages in their context may provide hints about how we might engage Augustine’s ideas about dialogue across difference, and how he, in turn, might challenge us no matter where we stand in contemporary conversations about spiritual but not religious. “Letter 102” reveals how Augustine thought about religious and spiritual practices outside of Christianity in his own time and place. Instructing Beginners in the Faith presents Augustine’s understanding of love for those who are different from us as “mutual indwelling” or “co-inhabitation.”
“Letter 102”
Sometime between 406 and 412, Augustine responded to a request from a priest in Carthage, Deogratias by name.Footnote 44 Deogratias had asked Augustine to respond to several questions raised by an unnamed pagan in Carthage. This pagan inquirer was himself a friend of Augustine, who was keen to have the man become a Christian.Footnote 45 One of the questions raised by this friend, an issue apparently discussed in the cosmopolitan city of Carthage, concerned the salvation of non-Christians. If Christ is the one and only way to salvation, as Christians claimed, what about all people in the history of humanity who never knew Christ.Footnote 46 The question had a corollary: if Christianity is a universal religion, why did God choose a particular time and place to reveal the Gospel and so, to that extent, limit access? The question is not incompatible with ones that spiritual but not religious persons might raise today about the relevance of Christian faith to spirituality and human purpose. Augustine’s response contains thoughts we might glean for our contemporary dialogue, reflecting both his Christian commitment and his openness to difference.
In his letter, Augustine affirms his Christian belief that the eternal Word of God, the second person of the Trinity, pervades all creation and history. All things were made and are sustained through Him, who is immutable. “In him there is the wisdom and knowledge for directing and governing all creation with respect to what should be done about it and when and where.”Footnote 47 Augustine invokes the central Christian doctrine of Incarnation and foregrounds this “prejudice” of his faith.
But he expands on this doctrine in light of his friend’s questions about particularity. Even before God spoke to Abraham and chose the Hebrews as his people, Augustine asserts, the eternal Word of God was available to all people. Before the beginning of salvation history as recounted in the Bible, God offered salvation “to all those from the beginning of human race who believed in him and understood him somehow or other, and lived pious and just lives according to these commandments, whenever and wherever they lived; [such persons] were undoubtedly saved through him.”Footnote 48
Though they had “different ceremonies and sacraments,… other names and signs than now,…” they shared the same faith and received the same salvation as Christians, from the one God and God’s eternal Word. Underneath and within the great variety of religious practices of the human race, Augustine affirms the presence of divine grace operative for the salvation of those who accepted God’s offer.Footnote 49 The Word of God, who would become flesh in Christ, was somehow present and active, though hidden, in human history.
It is the responsibility of Christians to practice their faith and celebrate their sacraments, which are the revealed and divinely appointed channels and occasions of grace. At the same time that they live in an assurance of divine revelation in Christ and the Scriptures, Christians must not preclude the salvation of others. They must allow that divine providence arranges “what is fitting and proper for any time” and that God approaches all human beings in different ways. Divine providence “surpasses human intelligence and is derived from the same source from which providence itself cares for things.”Footnote 50 Augustine refers to the mystery of this universal offer of salvation as part of divine wisdom “in which there perhaps lies hidden far more deeply another divine plan.”Footnote 51
“Letter 102” expresses Augustine’s conviction that the Word of God was present and active, offering salvation to those who responded in faith, who “understood him somehow or other,” and who lived good lives, no matter when and where they lived. Augustine bases his confidence in God’s universal offer of salvation not in “human intelligence,” but in God’s plan for humanity, “hidden far more deeply,” buried in the recesses of divine providence.Footnote 52 The different ceremonies and sacraments, names and signs provided various ways that the Divine Word approached these scattered children of Adam and Eve, and allowed them to respond to God in prayer and sacrifice.Footnote 53 Clearly, Augustine does not limit a spiritual life, empowered and enriched by divine grace, to the baptized, practicing members of the church.Footnote 54 His friend’s question prompted theological reflection by Augustine on the free availability and gracious ubiquity of the divine. Augustine’s reflections on the eternal Word of God living and active throughout all human experience are an example of a fusion of horizons between him and his pagan friend in their epistolary dialogue.Footnote 55
There are, however, two provisos, two “Augustinian prejudices.” Augustine would find strange any form what we might call “disembodied” spirituality. He would find a purely interior, unexpressed, and tacit spirituality to be lacking in substance. Explicit prayer and ritual sacrifice, even though they be different in form and practice from biblical worship and sacrament, were for Augustine an inherent part of human engagement with the divine. What we might call Augustine’s affirmation of the universal availability of grace still requires a response of thanksgiving and praise, with its own peculiar, acculturated expression and particular symbolic embodiment, together with ethical responsibility that mirrored that of the ten commandments. In this sense, if “spiritual but not religious” implies a spiritual life without embodied, symbolic, ritual observance of some type, and without observance of intuited divine law, it would not be part of his horizon.Footnote 56
The second proviso is Augustine’s mission, both as a Christian and as a bishop, to preach the Gospel. The revelation of God in Christ changes everything. Despite his expansive view of the universality of the Word of God, and its approach to all humans, Augustine still desired that his pagan friend become a Christian, “before it was too late.”Footnote 57
We can infer from the text of “Letter 102” that Augustine might allow that God’s Word was universally available to his contemporaries who had not yet had the Gospel preached to them. Nonetheless, he assumed that this state of affairs was being remedied by the missionary work of the church across the Roman Empire and beyond. He believed that the Gospel would soon be available to everyone. Rejection of the Gospel after hearing the Word, in his view, does not allow for any backward default to the kind of universal salvific activity of God available before or apart from salvation history. Although he allows that hypocritical Christians can cause scandal and thereby alienate potential believers, his sense of mission focuses his attention on spreading the Good News about Jesus Christ.Footnote 58 He is convinced that ancient human longing for the divine and the prophecies of the Old Testament have been fulfilled in Christ. Thus, he confesses this “prejudice” for the Word Incarnate, even amid his affirmation of the universality of salvation through the eternal Word. He stands firmly in Jewish and Christian historicity.
This tension is familiar to many Christians engaged in dialogue with spiritual but not religious persons in our own day.Footnote 59 It is the tension between Christian conviction and commitment, and a concomitant desire to remain open to the experience and decisions of persons who are spiritual but not religious. Hermeneutic honesty, as elaborated by Gadamer, can keep that tension creative so that conversation continues.
Instructing Beginners in the Faith
A second Augustinian idea might help keep this tension creative. It is his notion of “co-inhabitation.” Sometime around the year 400, the same Deogratias of Carthage had previously appealed to Augustine for advice and encouragement about teaching. Deogratias, responsible for the instruction of converts, had grown weary of teaching.Footnote 60 He believed his lecturing to be often distasteful and wearisome—not only to his students, but even to himself!Footnote 61
Augustine’s long response became the book Instructing Beginners in the Faith. In this work, Augustine addresses many aspects and challenges of teaching and learning. One of the main themes in the book, relevant to our topic, is pedagogical love. Teachers, claims Augustine, must love their students. Love transforms the learning environment. Augustine asserts that every student wants to be loved, that is, wants to be valued and respected. Certainly, teachers themselves also want to be loved and “gratified with the zealous attention” of their students. Teachers “feel greater affection for those students who pay attention.”Footnote 62 However, it is more important that teachers love their students.
When a student realizes that the teacher values her or him, they respond with enthusiasm. The value and respect of a teacher help students overcome the fear they may experience in a classroom.Footnote 63 Previous experience in the classroom can leave students—and teachers—weakened and with a broken spirit, dejected and with a sadness that pervades their whole attitude toward education.Footnote 64 A charitable attitude and demeanor toward students opens up the affective dimensions of learning. Rather than a tedious accumulation of dry facts, learning becomes a delight in new understanding, encouraged by a teacher who embodies charity and thereby emboldens students.Footnote 65
There are many parallels between the charitable dynamics in a teaching environment and the contextual subtleties in conversations that address religious and spiritual difference. What Augustine noted about students and their desire to be valued and respected applies to participants in such conversations. We all want to be appreciated and acknowledged despite differences in our experience, opinions, and convictions. The young people who gathered in Rome in March 2018 said this explicitly. Previous pastoral encounters may not have gone well for them. Past conversations may have left participants feeling misunderstood or rejected. The Augustinian injunction is that love is essential in all such conversations about religion and spirituality. A charitable attitude and demeanor toward one another increases the probability of learning from one another. Mutual respect and care embolden participants to be honest, opening new horizons for one another, and calling one another to significant change in how we understand, judge, and treat each other.
In a particularly moving passage, Augustine introduces his idea of “co-inhabitation,” when he describes how in the mutual quest for knowledge teacher and student “dwell in one another”:
We should endeavor to treat students with a brother’s, a father’s, and a mother’s love; and, if we are united with them in heart, to us no less than to them will these things seem new. For so great is the power of a sympathetic disposition of mind, that as they are affected while we are speaking, and we are affected while they are learning, we have our dwelling in each other. Thus, at one and the same time, they as it were speak what they hear, and we in them learn after a certain fashion what we teach.Footnote 66
We can apply Augustine’s insights in this passage to conversations about religion and spirituality. The kind of love and respect Augustine sees as paramount in the classroom is equally applicable to situations in which conversation partners explore their religious and spiritual differences. His idea of “dwelling in one another,” of co-inhabitation, can enrich and expand Gadamer’s idea of the fusion of horizons. The act of reaching out across differences, the confession of prejudices, and the shared exploration of assumptions: all of these intentions anticipate and constitute co-inhabitation. Conversation partners “have their dwelling in each other. Thus, at one and the same time, they as it were speak what they hear, and we in them learn after a certain fashion what we teach.” In the charitable fusion of horizons, conversation partners teach and learn from one another in a shared space of mutual respect and love. Augustine invites us, in language more explicit than found in Gadamer, to account for love in the hermeneutical process, to allow for the affective dimensions of thinking, learning, and listening. The Augustinian conviction is that divine grace sheds its creative light on our endeavor to understand one another and to learn from one another. The presence and power of divine grace as an element in the opening of horizons transforms that opening into an invitation to “dwell within” one another’s worlds of meaning and purpose.
To assume that people outside of the church are beyond reach of the eternal Word of God may betray a lack of humility before the deep mysteries of divine providence.Footnote 67 Augustinian thought leaves ample space to entertain and explore a spirituality of salvific relationship with the divine outside of conventional Christian belief and practice, according to a plan of God hidden in the secret recesses of divine providence.Footnote 68
Summary
The Catholic Church’s response to spiritual but not religious persons requires a thoughtful pastoral practice deepened by ideas such as those presented here. The leaders and members of the church, who aspire to become a synodal church that listens, must build a pastoral practice robust enough for dialogue with those whose spirituality searches elsewhere for its principles and practices. A synodal church requires pastoral sensitivity for those who have left its embrace, for those who stay but feel unheard, and for those who have never belonged to a Christian community but seek spiritual wisdom beyond religious horizons. The church needs to acknowledge the importance of the affective dimensions of listening to what is transpiring in the minds and hearts of those within and beyond its borders. It needs to realize its pastoral call to witness, acknowledge, and respond to the fervor of their questions. The church has great wisdom and well-practiced prudence in its spiritual traditions and theological reflections. It can bring these gifts to the many opportunities for dialogue in daily life, shared service, theological exploration, and spiritual conversation.
In a sermon preached to his congregation in Hippo, sometime around the year 420, Augustine used three dynamic present participles to describe what he hoped his homily would inspire. His words still speak to anyone who might want to enter conversation across religious or spiritual difference. He told his people gathered to celebrate the Eucharist, “Listen to me questioning (interrogantem) not arguing, seeking (quaerentem) more than assuming I know the answer, learning (discentem) rather than teaching, and, in fact, in me or through me, you too should be raising questions. The Lord, who is everywhere, is also close by; may he listen to the affection of his questioners and give them understanding.”Footnote 69 It would be difficult to find a more compelling injunction for conversations about religious and spiritual difference, especially when we remember that Augustine assumed divine grace to be operative in everyone’s quest for truth and authenticity, and in the shared search for mutual understanding.
A final thought. Those who have pastoral or catechetical responsibility will feel the tension that pervades “Letter 102.” Augustine loved his friend and, because of that love, was deeply concerned that his friend become a Christian. It is remarkable that the Bishop of Hippo, despite or even because of his own faith, was nonetheless able to affirm a “more deeply hidden” divine providence that reached far beyond the Christian dispensation to which Augustine was passionately devoted. It is not a weakness, but rather a hermeneutical strength that we can share Augustine’s passion for the Gospel, and at the same time respect the hidden providence of God active in the spiritual lives of those whose understanding and judgment lead or leave them beyond the community of faith. Informed pastoral outreach and dialogue across difference, in the many occasions that bring us together, can help us “dwell in each other” despite disagreement and because of grace.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
