Heroic Virtue: an interview with Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B. by Richard Smoley Gnosis, Summer 1992

Like us, the saints had human shortcomings.  But they had some outstanding quality that redeemed all the rest. 

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Smoley: How could you look at that so as to encourage yourself?

Brother David: It depends.  You might be looking at a form of hagiography that makes the saint into so elevated a personage that this model cannot really be imitated.  In that case, I would say don’t read that kind of hagiography, it will only lead you astray.  But the saints were human exactly as we are.  They should be presented with their human weaknesses; they don’t have to be perfect in every way.  The more I look at the lives of saints, the more I find that even in the great saints and in those I most admire, there’s maybe not even 50 percent really to be imitated.  Like us, the saints had human shortcomings.  But they had some outstanding quality that redeemed all the rest.  To show that a very imperfect human creature — which so many saints are and were — can really be perfect in spite of all those imperfections, that’s what a healthy hagiography wants to show.  By the way, are you familiar with the enneagram?

Smoley: Yes.

Brother David: Well, even just a basic familiarity with the enneagram shows you that every human being chooses a partial perfection and so becomes imperfect in a typical way.  That’s pretty evident when you begin to study it.  The enneagram shows that everyone is eccentric in one way or another.  We’re out of the center.  We have to find our balance by moving to a different position on the periphery of the circle. It’s a lifetime task to overcome the particular form of warpedness that each of us has chosen.  But notice that the circle on which the types of the enneagram are arranged is a figure completely different from that traditional one, the ladder, with its different rungs and degrees of sanctity that we had before. 

It’s a totally different approach to human perfection, and therefore to hagiography, if you start out with the circle of the enneagram, in which each type is a point on the periphery and all are off center; the center is Christ, you might say.  All are the same distance of center when we start out.  No one is better off than the other and everyone is in a sense badly off.  We have to overcome our weakness and “go against the arrows,” as the enneagram would say.  That’s such a different thing from having to climb a ladder with the saints on the top and you somewhere on the bottom.  When you go from rung to rung, it’s a linear image; it doesn’t do justice to real life. 

Smoley: Of course the ladder is such a traditional image, like Jacob’s ladder in Genesis. 

Brother David: Sure, St. John Climacus, St. Benedict, St. Bernard — the idea of a ladder of perfection plays a very important role.  And of course there are some positive aspects to that image too.  But we live in a time of change from linear thinking to global thinking.  In the course of this enormous change, which has happened within my lifetime, some traditional images like the ladder have lost a lot of their power.  We have to find new ones; the enneagram fits better. 

Smoley: The question of the enneagram brings up one thing that you had mentioned in an interview several years ago.  You said you didn’t think there was such a thing as an esoteric Christian teaching in the sense of some hidden wisdom that Christ passed on to some of his disciples.  Some say the enneagram came from esoteric Christian teachings, some say from Sufi teachings…  

Brother David: Sufi, more likely. 

Smoley: What is the role of esoteric teaching in Christianity?  Is there such a thing?  Is that a proper way of looking at it? 

Brother David: In 1 Corinthians 2:6, St. Paul says something like, “We teach a wisdom that is for the perfect,” and that has often been understood as some secret teaching that is handed on privately.  Or as the Gospels say, “Jesus spoke to the multitudes in parables but to his disciples he explained them,” and so on.  Yet the evidence that there was any secret teaching that was handed on only to the initiated is nil.         

There is of course a hidden teaching in every tradition, and also in the Christian tradition.  And the best way of hiding something is to put it out in the open, where nobody who looks for hidden things will ever find it.  So the hidden teaching is right out front, but you have to have eyes to see.  What does that mean in our context, having eyes to see?  It means that you will get at it by committing yourself.  That links up with what was probably from the beginning the intention of that saying, “Those who have will receive; those who do not have, even what they have will be taken away from them.”  Originally that was a proverb that Jesus used; as we say, “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”  That’s a common observation; he is probably saying, “Well, don’t you know that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer?  It’s the same in the spiritual life.”  That might very well be, and I suspect it is, the kernel of this saying.         

But what does it mean?  Well, in Luke, I believe it is, there is an explicit reference to listening: “Take care how you listen!”  Those who give ear and really listen, who have this attention, this openness, more will be given to them.  And those who don’t have any interest will lose what little they have got.  It’s a matter of opening yourself, committing yourself to the message, and then you will enter into those hidden secrets, into the esoteric, if you want.  But it’s not esoteric in the sense that it is not divulged to others.  There were such teachings among the alchemists in the Middle Ages, and also among the Gnostics, but I do not see anything of that sort in genuine Christianity.  And again this fits nicely into hagiography: the saints didn’t achieve heroic virtue and achieve the spiritual status they had because they were given hidden clues, like you give somebody a tip to betting on horses.  They were not given more than any others, and often they had some severe handicaps.  But they committed themselves. 

Smoley: So attention and commitment and openness would be the esoteric keys… 

Brother David: The keys to the hidden message.  The terms “esoteric” and “exoteric” don’t fit here very well.  Christianity doesn’t have what one normally thinks of as an esoteric teaching.

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