The threefold way

The threefold way describes spiritual life as a movement from clearing what obstructs the soul, through growing in knowledge of God, toward intimacy with God. Its three stages—the purgative, illuminative, and unitive ways—appear in the book both as a scheme for reading Scripture and as a pattern of spiritual experience. The scheme gives spiritual growth a direction, but the lives considered alongside it emphasize that the journey may be gradual, interrupted, and dependent on grace rather than achieved by intellectual effort alone.

The Three Stages and Scripture

The purgative way is the effort to remove from life what obscures the ascent to God. The illuminative way brings increased knowledge of God and spiritual truth. The unitive way culminates in mystical union with God. These stages are not merely three topics: they describe a progression from moral preparation, through understanding, to loving intimacy.

Origen connected this progression with the three books of Solomon. Proverbs teaches moral and virtuous living and thus corresponds to purgation. Ecclesiastes considers the nature of things and their proper use, making it an image of illumination. The Song of Songs, with its language of desire and love, points toward union with God. The correspondence makes spiritual reading part of the ascent: Scripture can guide moral change, deepen understanding, and kindle desire for God.

Origen’s broader account of Scripture offers a related, though not identical, threefold pattern. He compared the Bible’s common historical sense to the body, its broader spiritual meaning to the soul, and its deepest wisdom to the spirit. He also read the history of Israel as a story of the fall and rise of souls. In his account, the outer person, made from the dust, stands in contrast with the inner person made in the image of God: the inner nature desires to rise toward God, while bodily life can hold it back. These distinctions help explain why spiritual ascent requires more than literal or intellectual understanding; the reader, like the soul, must also change.

Bernard’s Three Kisses

Bernard of Clairvaux made the stages tangible through an image of successive kisses. The first is a kiss at Christ’s feet, associated with confession, forgiveness, and the humility of seeking purity of heart. The second is a kiss of Christ’s hand, which lifts and guides the person in spiritual growth. The third is the kiss of Christ’s mouth: an intimacy with God described as unbounded joy. The sequence recasts purgation, illumination, and union as gestures of approach and reception.

Bernard gives the first step a further complication. Christ’s feet signify both mercy and judgment. Fear recognizes judgment, while hope in forgiveness gives rise to mercy; neither can safely be separated from the other. Judgment without mercy leads to despair, while mercy without judgment encourages complacency. The image therefore makes spiritual progress a discipline of holding accountability and hope together, not simply moving past sin as though it had no consequence.

The later stages also depend on what the person receives rather than on self-sufficiency. The hand represents divine help in renewal and growth, and contemplation leads, in Bernard’s account, to the repose associated with the final kiss. He returned to the images of feet, hands, and the kiss in later sermons, extending their meanings rather than leaving them behind after introducing the three steps. The repeated imagery presents the way as a sustained spiritual pattern: humility, guidance, and intimacy remain connected.

Conversion as a Gradual Journey

Augustine’s conversion illustrates the difference between a spiritual journey and a sudden change detached from its past. Before his decisive crisis, he sought knowledge of God, encountered Neoplatonism and Manichaeism, and approached Christian faith through people he respected. The influence of Ambrose continued to stimulate his progress, while his friend Alypius helped him understand the Catholic belief that Christ was God clothed in flesh. Reading Paul brought him to see what Neoplatonist thought lacked: grace, humility, confession, and the aid of the Holy Spirit.

The crisis came after Ponticianus told Augustine and Alypius about Antony and other monks who had left the cities of the Roman Empire for lives of prayer and self-denial. Augustine was shaken by the contrast between their simplicity and his own divided life. Alone in a garden, he struggled with desires he was not yet willing to relinquish. A child’s repeated call to pick up and read led him back to Paul’s letter to the Romans. The passage he opened directed him to put on Jesus Christ and make no provision for the desires of the flesh. Augustine understood the words as speaking directly to the life he had lived; he later described relief from anxiety and the dispersal of doubt.

The change had consequences beyond the garden. Augustine told his mother, Monica, who received the news with joy; she died soon afterward, at fifty-six, when Augustine was thirty-three. He was baptized with his son, Adeodatus, and Alypius, and later returned to North Africa to establish a monastery at Tagaste with friends. In his account, conversion made a celibate life possible, and that change opened the way to a further mystical experience: at Ostia, he and Monica briefly reached toward eternal wisdom together. The sequence underscores the book’s distinction between a decisive turning point and the longer preparation that makes it possible. Augustine’s own reflection emphasizes that intellectual searching did not accomplish the change by itself; crisis made him receptive to grace.

Other lives in the book likewise resist the idea that conversion is simply an instantaneous arrival. Dorothy Day’s religious longings grew amid her radical commitments and experiences, including attending services and receiving a rosary. When her daughter Tamar was baptized in July 1927, Day decided to have her own daughter baptized, knowing that this would end her relationship with Forster Batterham, though they remained in contact. Day was baptized that December. What might look like a sudden decision was presented instead as the gathering together of earlier religious stirrings, with a real personal cost.

For Thomas Merton, baptism was a beginning rather than a conclusion. After hesitations, he went to Corpus Christi Catholic Church beside the Columbia campus and took instruction, without anyone pushing him toward conversion. He later recognized that change had been approaching for a long time, even though he had not sensed it. His account reinforces the threefold way’s usefulness as a pattern of development: a spiritual life continues after a decisive commitment and cannot be reduced to the moment that begins it.

From Inward Change to Relationship and Practice

The book’s other examples broaden the setting in which spiritual understanding develops, without making every life a formal illustration of the three stages. Howard Thurman’s experience, for example, was shaped by the realities of segregation and slavery. His grandmother, a former slave who could not read, had him read the Bible aloud, but rejected passages by Paul because they instructed enslaved people to obey their masters. On a 1935 pilgrimage, Thurman was challenged in Ceylon by a college principal who asked how he could remain Christian in light of the faith’s historic sanction of slavery and the segregation and violence Thurman had experienced in the United States. Thurman distinguished Christianity from the religion of Jesus and condemned slavery and racial prejudice. Later in India, a conversation that began as an exchange of religious arguments became, in Thurman’s account, an experience of spiritual unity between two people who remained distinct. The episode suggests how understanding can deepen through encounter, while preserving the limits of the comparison: the book does not identify it as a step-by-step instance of the threefold way.

Dorothy Day’s later work similarly shows that religious life in the book reaches beyond inward experience. With Peter Maurin, she began The Catholic Worker, whose first issue appeared on May 1, 1933, addressing unemployment, labor, racism, child labor, and other social questions. Day’s understanding of God’s presence was especially bound to poor people. The hospitality houses offered food and shelter to people in need, including guests who could be difficult to help, and Day understood such service as welcoming Christ. These actions are not presented as a separate stage in the threefold scheme; they show, rather, how a life of faith could take practical form in response to human need.

Taken together, the accounts give the threefold way both a structure and a restraint. Its stages describe movement toward God, but do not promise instant progress or make spiritual growth a personal achievement. Origen’s scriptural correspondences, Bernard’s recurring gestures, and the conversion narratives each emphasize preparation, received guidance, and change that continues after a decisive moment. The way is an ascent, but one whose course is shown through particular acts of reading, surrender, relationship, and service.