Three ways of the spiritual life

The Three ways of the spiritual life is a framework for understanding spiritual ascent as a movement through purification, growing insight, and intimacy with God. Its three stages—the purgative, illuminative, and unitive ways—appear in distinct forms in Origen’s reading of Solomon and Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons on the spiritual kiss. In both accounts, ascent is not merely an abstract progression: it involves moral change, a transformed understanding, and a relationship understood as encounter.

The Three Stages

The purgative way begins by removing what obstructs the soul’s ascent to God. It is associated with turning from sin and seeking purity of heart. The illuminative way follows as a growth in knowledge of God and spiritual truth, including learning how to live faithfully. The unitive way is the culmination: mystical union or intimate communion with God. The sequence therefore links ethical change with understanding and, finally, experiential closeness; it does not treat spiritual life as knowledge alone.

The framework is presented as a standard outline used by mystical writers, but its stages can be conveyed through different images. Origen interprets the three books of Solomon as a progression: Proverbs teaches moral and virtuous living and thus corresponds to purgation; Ecclesiastes considers the nature of things and their proper use, corresponding to illumination; and The Song of Songs awakens desire and love for God, corresponding to union. The movement runs from the ordering of life, through discernment, toward love.

Origen’s Scriptural Pattern

Origen’s mapping belongs to a wider nonliteral reading of Scripture. He understands biblical history as a spiritual account of the fall and rise of souls, and compares the Bible’s common historical sense to the body, its broader spiritual understanding to the soul, and its hidden wisdom to the spirit. Within this interpretive scheme, the books of Solomon do more than offer separate kinds of instruction: together they can signify stages in the soul’s ascent.

The Song of Songs gives the final stage its language of desire and intimacy. Its lovers’ joy in being together and unhappiness when apart, along with images of the wound of love, the kiss, the embrace, and the bed, become a way of expressing the soul’s longing for God. Origen’s interpretation makes that desire spiritually consequential: human eros can turn the soul toward God. The unitive way is therefore not simply the last item in a moral curriculum; it is the fulfillment of a longing that the earlier stages prepare and direct.

Bernard’s Sequence of the Kiss

Bernard of Clairvaux gives the three ways a bodily and relational image. The first kiss is directed to Christ’s feet: the penitent seeks forgiveness and confronts sin in humility. The second is to Christ’s hand, which lifts and guides the person in spiritual growth. The third is the kiss of Christ, representing holy intimacy and unbounded joy in God’s presence. Bernard’s sequence corresponds to purgation, illumination, and union, but makes each transition legible as a change in the soul’s relation to Christ.

The imagery also connects inward development to the experience of divine aid. Confession brings lowliness before God; the touch of the hand signifies renewal and guidance; contemplation leads to ecstatic repose, figured as the kiss of Christ’s mouth. Bernard stresses that the final experience cannot be fully communicated to someone who has not received it. Its inwardness marks a limit of description, while the sequence of feet, hand, and mouth still gives readers a structure for understanding its approach.

Mercy, Judgment, and the Shape of Progress

Bernard returns to the imagery of the feet in later sermons, underscoring how central the sequence is to his account. He identifies Christ’s two spiritual feet as mercy and judgment. Their imprint is recognized through the paired signs of hope for forgiveness and fear of divine judgment. Neither can safely be isolated: judgment without mercy leads to despair, while mercy without judgment fosters what Bernard calls pernicious security.

This balance adds a moral discipline to the framework. The first stage is not a simple rejection of wrongdoing, but a reckoning that holds accountability and the hope of forgiveness together. The later stages likewise depend on aid and relationship, rather than self-sufficient effort. Across Origen’s scriptural interpretation and Bernard’s devotional imagery, the three ways describe a directed movement—from moral reorientation, through spiritual formation, to intimacy with God—while allowing that movement to be expressed through different texts, images, and experiences.