We go on to ask history what it has to tell us on the second point, the process by which the individual normally develops this life of the Spirit, the serial changes it demands; for plainly, to know this is of practical importance to us.  The full inwardness of these changes will be considered when we come to the personal aspect of the spiritual life.  Now we are only concerned to notice that history tends to establish the constant recurrence of a normal process, recognizable alike in great and small personalities under the various labels which have been given to it, by which the self moves from its usually exclusive correspondence with the temporal order to those full correspondences with reality, that union with God, characteristic of the spiritual life.  This life we must believe in some form and degree to be possible for all; but we study it best on heroic levels, for here its moments are best marked and its fullest records survive.

The first moment of this process seems to be, that man falls out of love with life as he has commonly lived it, and the world as he has known it.  Dissatisfaction and disillusion possess him; the negative marks of his nascent intuition of another life, for which he is intended but which he has not yet found.  We see this initial phase very well in St. Benedict, disgusted by the meaningless life of Roman society; in St. Francis, abandoning his gay and successful social existence; in Richard Rolle, turning suddenly from scholarship to a hermit’s life; in the restless misery of St. Catherine of Genoa; in Fox, desperately seeking “something that could speak to his condition”; and also in two outstanding examples from modern India, those of the Maharishi Devendranath Tagore and the Sadhu Sundar Singh.  This dissatisfaction, sometimes associated with the negative vision or conviction of sin, sometimes with the positive longing for holiness and peace, is the mental preparation of conversion; which, though not a constant, is at least a characteristic feature of the beginning of the spiritual life as seen in history.  We might, indeed, expect some crucial change of attitude, some inner crisis, to mark the beginning of a new life which is to aim only at God.  Here too we find one motive of that movement of world-abandonment which so commonly follows conversion, especially in heroic souls.  Thus St. Paul hides himself in Arabia; St. Benedict retires for three years to the cave at Subiaco; St. Ignatius to Manresa.  Gerard Groot, the brilliant and wealthy young Dutchman who founded the brotherhood of the Common Life, began his new life by self-seclusion in a Carthusian cell.  St. Catherine of Siena at first lived solitary in her own room.  St. Francis with dramatic completeness abandoned his whole past, even the clothing that was part of it.  Jacopone da Todi, the prosperous lawyer converted to Christ’s poverty, resorted to the most grotesque devices to express his utter separation from the world.  Others, it is true, have chosen quieter methods, and found in that which St. Catherine calls the cell of self-knowledge the solitude they required; but some decisive break was imperative for all.  History assures us that there is no easy sliding into the life of the Spirit.