This work has been constructed as a daily companion to deepen and fortify the foundation of your interior life as taught by the tradition of the Church.
Cultivating the Spiritual Life is intended to serve as a day-by-day guide for you to live a devout life in the world to point the way to an enlightened, well-balanced, and authentic piety.
Taken from the writings primarily of that great 20th century master of the spiritual life, Fr. Adolphe Tanquerey, and further enhanced with writings from various doctors of the Church, saints, mystics, and theologians, Cultivating the Spiritual Life is a daily companion for those searching to grow closer to Christ by understanding how the spiritual life works in us. The purpose of this work is to transcend any particular school or preference of spirituality, but rather to show what is universally common to the Catholic spiritual life and what each soul must know to succeed in his own earthly pilgrimage to God.
Fr. Tanquerey composed a complete and orderly summary of questions on the spiritual life which can serve as a devotional treatise for spiritual reading by his clear, lively, practical, and careful writing that serves to help foster a truly devout life while avoiding being dry and being controversial.
Cultivating the Spiritual Life should be read by taking the teachings of the Church as a whole and finding the common principles and rules for strengthening the basic fundamentals that the Church has always taught. Fr. Tanquerey wrote those for all those "who are seeking to live a thoroughly Christian life and thus fit themselves to be living, breathing models of Christ in the world today by a deep interior life."
Fr. Adolphe Tanquerey, PSS (1854-1932) was a Sulpician priest who was a powerful formator for the Suplicians and the vast number of seminarians in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Fr. Tanquerey earned doctorates in both Theology & Canon Law and served the Church by being a professor of philosophy, Canon Law, dogmatic theology, and moral theology, vice-rector, chaplain in running a military hospital during World War I, and superior of a house of novices. Arguably, however, Fr. Tanquerey is most highly regarded and has as his longest-lasting legacy as a Catholic writer on theology. His textbooks on dogmatic and moral theology were works par excellence for seminary formation in the 20th century and were highly regarded for his culling of teachings from saints, mystics, and theologians and synthesizing them harmoniously into a form that fosters the soul with the Church's perennial teachings in an easily accessible manner. These works, however, were seen as prequels to his magnum opus: his treatise on the spiritual life. Fr. Tanquerey saw the spiritual life as one that is founded in dogma, but that dogma is the foundation for aestheticism, the meeting of the soul with Christ. His work, The Spiritual Life: A treatise on Ascetical and Mystical Theology, was written and constantly revised over the last 13 years of his life and is still relevant today for all souls-- whether a beginner or a well-advanced soul in the interior life.
