Before examining later doctrinal and spiritual developments, it is necessary to return to the source: the Gospels and the testimony of the first disciples. They bear powerful witness that the revelation of Christ passes through a sensible encounter, where sight, hearing, and touch play a decisive role. Far from despising the senses, the Gospel narrative involves them at the very heart of the relationship with the Risen One. It is thus in the very flesh of the paschal experience that an implicit theology of the senses is sketched out: not merely as simple receptors of information, but as places of inner transformation and spiritual recognition.

Looking closely at Jesus’ miracles, we notice that the vast majority concern the senses: healing of the deaf, the mute, the blind, the paralyzed. These miracles are signs, but not only for the sick, their first beneficiaries. They are signs, living parables for the witnesses of the healing, beginning with the Pharisees or even the disciples. The true blind person is the one who thinks he sees; the true deaf person is the one who thinks he hears; the true paralytic, the one whose heart is hardened. Salvation is accomplished in a human life when the person is inhabited by his or her sensory faculties in their entirety: not only those oriented toward the external world, but also those directed toward the inner soul. These “inner senses,” also called spiritual, designate those capacities of perception and discernment which, beyond corporal organs, make it possible to welcome the life of the Kingdom and to open to the action of the Spirit. Without this inner awakening, a life can remain on the surface of things, in an illusion of truth. It is this form of blindness that Jesus confronts the Pharisees with, at the end of the story of the man born blind: “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains” (Jn 9:41). And, earlier in the Gospel of John, he had already specified the meaning of his action: “I came into this world for judgment (krisis), so that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind” (Jn 9:39). This krisis is not an automatic condemnation but a revelation: it manifests the necessity of an inner gaze open to enter the Kingdom.

The great moment of unification between the external senses and the inner senses takes place on Easter morning, during the appearances of the Risen One, particularly in the Gospel according to Saint John, with Mary Magdalene (Jn 20:11–18) and Thomas (Jn 20:24–29). With Mary Magdalene, the narrative first shows the awakening of sight, then that of hearing. In her inner agitation, she seeks to see, to touch the body of Jesus; but she does not recognize the Risen One. She needs another gaze. Similarly, she does not at once identify his voice, though it was so familiar. Only when Jesus pronounces her name, “Mary,” does she stir: like the sheep that recognize the voice of the good shepherd (cf. Jn 10:3–4), like the beloved who hears the call of her lover in the Song of Songs (cf. Song 2:8). It is then that a spiritual sense of hearing unfolds, paradoxically opening the way to true vision. Touch, for its part, occupies a central place in the scene. Mary seems to have grasped the feet of Jesus, to the point that he must say to her: “Do not hold on to me” (Jn 20:17). This gesture of loving attachment, charged with emotion, is converted by the Risen One into another mode of relationship: the fraternal relationship. “Go to my brothers…”: from now on, it is in the mediation of faith and in communion with the brethren that Christ allows himself to be “touched.”

With Thomas, the movement seems reversed compared with Mary Magdalene’s experience. Jesus explicitly invites him to mobilize his senses: “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Do not be unbelieving, but believe” (Jn 20:27). Yet the text reports no gesture. The disciple does not touch. In an inner flash, he transcends the register of the sensible to confess, the first, that Jesus, who belongs to the same human race, is also God: “My Lord and my God” (Jn 20:28). Jesus’ response, in many respects, concludes the entire Gospel (Jn 21 forming an epilogue): “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (Jn 20:29). This word, formulated as a beatitude, marks a turning point. It points to a new modality of relationship with the Risen One, where faith comes first, and no longer the corporal senses. It is no longer a matter of seeing in order to believe, but of believing without seeing, like the beloved disciple entering the empty tomb, “he saw and believed” (Jn 20:8). Faith becomes the organ of encounter.

From now on, access to Christ passes through an inner perception, an openness of the soul capable of welcoming the Presence without immediate sensible mediation. The external senses, relegated to the background, can still grasp signs, but these are only tokens: they refer to a spiritual reality that reveals itself only to faith.

In the meantime, Saint John seems to have advanced. This is evident in the opening of his first epistle, where a still-vivid emotion surfaces:

Several decades after the paschal events, John remains gripped by the founding encounter with the One who was “in the beginning.” One still perceives in his words the inner upheaval of one who has truly experienced the Word of life. He is not recalling an isolated memory nor a maxim of the Master; he insists, again and again, on the language of the senses: hearing, seeing, beholding, touching. This sensory register refers not only to the presence of Christ “in the days of his flesh” (cf. Heb 5:7), but also and above all to the experience of the Risen One. The Word was made audible, visible, tangible: it is through the senses that life was communicated.

The insistence on touch, in particular, attests to a very physical reality: it is not a ghost, but the Living One. In the background, one can also glimpse the trace of a unique intimacy, that of the disciple who reclined on Jesus’ breast on the evening of Holy Thursday (cf. Jn 13:25). The apostolic testimony is rooted in this sensible and personal experience, and it is from it that he addresses his readers.

One question remains: does John insist on this experience in order to affirm its irrefutability—as a privilege reserved to those who knew Jesus in the flesh—or does he open a path for those who, moved by the Spirit, can still today access this sensory communion?

It is difficult to decide. We may note, however, that the verb “to listen” occurs fourteen times in this first letter. As if, after the earthly passage of the Word, only listening remained as the way of access to faith. The believer is thus led back to Israel’s condition: “Hear, O Israel” (Deut 6:4), and to Paul’s words: “Faith comes from hearing” (Rom 10:17).

Are the external senses—sight, touch, taste, or smell—henceforth relegated to the background? It seems, at least, that John strongly recalls the incarnate rootedness of Revelation to counter the first forms of gnosticism or docetism that threatened to separate the Son of God from his coming in the flesh. The apostolicity of the testimony passes through sensory attestation, but it remains open to a faith that, even today, is exercised in listening and in the Spirit.

Yet, in its own way, the First Letter of John also raises the question that holds us: for each of us, is it possible to integrate the sensory dimension into faith in the Risen Christ? If so, how? Theorizing a bit, we might ask what kind of relationship the regime of the Resurrection establishes between the external senses and the inner senses. Over the centuries, this would be the question for a number of Church Fathers, from Origen to Saint Bernard and Saint Bonaventure, from Diadochus of Photice to the Rhineland mystics, including Saint John of the Cross and Saint Ignatius.

But before turning to the patristic age, let us first look at the liturgy in the earliest Christian communities. For many Christians today, for example, the celebration of entry into the catechumenate is now familiar. We know that its origin is very ancient. Why did the ancients choose to celebrate the signing of the forehead and of the senses as the principal rite of welcome: hearing (the ears), sight (the eyes), taste (speech), the heart (the central organ), and then the shoulders, a sign of spiritual strength? The answer is given by the prayer of the celebrant: “May they come to the illumination of the new birth.” Inner illumination comes through the mediation of the external senses. As if the sign of salvation, the cross, expressed a desire to open up these parts of the body, unblocking the more or less obstructed channels, leading to the nodal place that is the heart, where the presence of the Spirit of the Risen Jesus will dwell for the catechumens.

From the beginning of the Church, the senses have been at work in the liturgy. Perfumed oil was used as chrism; very soon incense—though once reserved for pagan gods—was also employed. The eucharistic bread was that which is still used today in the Byzantine rite. Received by intinction, it was markedly more flavorful than ours (in the Latin rite, the use of unleavened hosts would become generalized much later, in the 9^th century). Painted images or mosaics quickly appeared in a kind of profusion, already in the time of the Roman catacombs; likewise, chant, music, and instruments. Touch was also present, beginning with the powerful gesture of baptismal immersion. Christian liturgy, like the Jewish tradition but even more so through images, thus attests that the senses are an integral part of the confessing and praying experience. If the Word met us through his senses and spoke to the first witnesses through their senses and understanding, he does the same today in the new regime of the resurrection. Symbolic language, in the strong sense, sacramental, presupposes the most refined possible experience of the senses, so that true conversion and lasting adherence may occur. Indeed, it concerns the very meaning of sacramentality itself, where grace—that which is too often associated only with the purely spiritual—does not substitute for nature—that which is thought to be simply material—but enables it to be fulfilled by perfecting it.

Thus, in its own way, according to the adage lex orandi, lex credendi, the ancient liturgy answers our question by suggesting that believers are endowed with both internal and external senses, which cannot be separated from each other. They encounter God in communal prayer by looking, listening, smelling, touching, and eating.

In the 3^rd century, the great Origen of Alexandria was the first to theorize the doctrine of the spiritual senses. Alongside the corporal senses, Origen affirmed that there are indeed senses ordered to the understanding of the divine, immaterial world. He used the word aisthesis, which can be translated as “immediate perception,” of a different order than reasoning: a form of experience of God that enlightens the inner gaze, that allows one to taste his sweetness, to sense his presence, to recognize the sound of his voice, but which is nevertheless not given through the mediation of corporal senses. The meaning is metaphorical. “The knowledge of God does not depend on the eye of the body, but on the spirit. The latter sees what is in the image of the Creator, and it has received from the providence of God the power to know God. And the one who sees God is the pure heart1.” (a reference to the beatitude “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God”). He concludes: “the spiritual sense is a higher, non-corporeal sense.”

According to Michel Fédou, one of his contemporary specialists, Origen is caught in tension between, on the one hand, his dualistic, spiritualizing Platonic anthropology, which does not greatly esteem the corporal dimension, and on the other hand, his allegorical commentaries, for example on the Song of Songs, where the corporal senses are more than magnified2. For him, to read the Word, to truly enter into it, and thus to encounter Christ, the mediation of the senses is necessary.

Origen’s doctrine would have a long legacy. Over the centuries, more than one nuance would appear among the doctrines, which is not surprising, since certain anthropological currents would welcome the corporal dimension in spiritual experience more favorably than others. They would integrate sensibility into the believing relationship, into prayer. It would certainly be necessary to map out these nuances with Pseudo-Macarius, Diadochus, Gregory of Nyssa, Saint Bernard, Saint Bonaventure, Saint John of the Cross, and Saint Ignatius. I will only mention here the position of Saint Bonaventure, who integrates this doctrine of the spiritual senses into a global vision of his mystical theology, where the knowledge of God passes through an inner purification of the senses and a progressive union of all the faculties. For him, the spiritual senses are a capacity given by grace, enabling the believer to see the divine light, to hear the living word of God, to taste spiritual sweetness, to smell the fragrance of holiness, and to touch the divine presence. These experiences are not only intellectual (in the noble sense) but profoundly affective.

Saint Bonaventure is among those who most clearly highlight the continuity between corporal and spiritual senses. In his Itinerarium mentis in Deum, he describes a process of ascent toward God based on a “mystical ladder,” gradually integrating the external senses, the inner powers of the soul, and the spirit itself. This ascent, structured in three stages—purificatio, illuminatio, perfectio—nevertheless requires rigorous purification, even to a kind of “night of the senses,” a necessary prelude to a true spiritual perception. He thus writes: “Just as all corporal senses are subordinated to sight, so in the spiritual order all the faculties must be ordered to contemplation.” And further: “The soul must purify and detach itself from every corporal sensation if it wishes to attain the divine light3.” Emmanuel Falque highlights the Bonaventurian link between flesh and spirit: “It is not contradictory to speak of a ‘flesh of the world,’ even in Bonaventure, for whom the ‘book of the world’ precedes the ‘book of Scripture’4.” The ascending journey shows clearly that, in Bonaventure, openness to spiritual realities passes through a coordination and surpassing of corporal senses, rather than their simple setting aside. The distance, even rupture, between corporal and spiritual senses is overcome, whereas we still find it in Saint Bernard, for example, when he affirms that the spiritual senses begin to function once the corporal senses have fallen asleep5. The question also has an eschatological dimension. Referring to the “new man” (Eph 4:24) or the “inner man” (2 Cor 4:16; Eph 3:16; Rom 7:22–23), already resurrected in germ, Saint Bernard wonders: are the spiritual senses transfigured external senses, and thus homogeneous with them? Or do these spiritual senses constitute a new inner sense, given by grace, radically heterogeneous with respect to the physical? But I would like to leap ahead to the 15^th–16^th centuries to speak now of Saint Ignatius and how he understood the place of the senses in spiritual life.

2. Saint Ignatius of Loyola and the “Application of the Senses”

Indeed, in the Spiritual Exercises, Saint Ignatius invites the retreatant to make an “application of the senses,” as the last of the five daily exercises6. This proposal occurs almost every evening during the four weeks of the Exercises. He invites the retreatant to allow himself to be touched, through his sensibility, even in his body, to do almost what is mentioned at the beginning of the First Letter of John cited above. As if the Word, through the four previous exercises, could at this fifth hour become visible, audible, tangible to the senses. As if what Paul says in 2 Cor 3:18 were fulfilled: “All of us, with unveiled faces, reflecting the glory of the Lord as in a mirror, are being transformed into that same image.” This “application of the senses” may be experienced in a very discreet way, or much more manifestly. It can lead to a deep union with the Lord, leading to peace, unification, even healing of the corporal senses, even if, once again, it can also be lived as a desert, a night.

Before describing the unfolding of a typical day in the Exercises, let us first note that Saint Ignatius does not speak of “spiritual senses.” He knows the debate we have just mentioned and remains very cautious7. He does not wish to enter into a theorization of experiential knowledge of God. What he wishes is to propose his own experience to help others, giving full place to affectivity and sensibility, without neglecting reason. Often, he will use the expression “to feel and to recognize” the motions (SE 313): “to feel” (activity of spiritual affectivity, SE 2; 65) and “to recognize” (the activity of praying reason in rereading, SE 89; 109; 130). In addition, he promotes three kinds of prayer: consideration, meditation, and contemplation. Consideration is a sustained attention of loving intelligence, for example by reading a passage of Scripture in a low voice. Meditation is the summoning of the “three powers of the soul”: memory, intelligence, and will (the will in the 16^th century meaning the capacity to allow oneself to be affected, not the voluntary determination—this modern sense appearing only in the 17^th century). Finally, contemplation, where these three faculties are always present but in support, as a passive presence, welcoming the sensible realities of the Gospel stories. In contemplation, one is to “see” the persons, then “hear what they say,” “observe, pay attention to what they do.” The goal of these three forms of prayer (consideration, meditation, contemplation) is to “feel and to recognize” (SE 313) the presence of God so that divine realities remain within us. Among these three, contemplation, thanks to the application of the senses which we will now examine, will foster what we might call an affective memory, in order to be better disciples: the grace of the second week being “to ask for an intimate knowledge of the Lord who for me has become man, that I may love him and follow him more” (SE 103).

Let us now describe the process of the application of the senses. A typical day of the Spiritual Exercises includes first two times (that is, two exercises) of contemplation of Gospel stories, then two exercises of repetition of these contemplations, where the retreatant revisits the parts of the two previous stories where he perceived more consolation or, on the contrary, more resistance. Finally, at the end of the evening, comes the fifth exercise of the application of the senses, which is then experienced as the culmination of this day of prayer. Already, the retreatant had taken care to compose, by imagination, a place where the Gospel scene unfolds. Already, the two contemplations and the repetitions had engaged sight and hearing. At this last stage, the retreatant is invited to pray, in addition to sight and hearing, with smell, taste, and touch. This palette of the senses gives the will and intelligence a greater passivity. This very affective form of contemplation has the truly audacious goal of letting us enter more deeply into the humanity of the Lord—an immersive experience, we might say today—as if anticipating the transfiguration of our vulnerable flesh.

Thus, the application of the senses can be understood as the summit of a form of knowledge that embraces not only the corporal senses, but also the affects, the feelings, and thus inner knowledge: memory, imagination (with the reality of the unconscious), intelligence, will. From the beginning of the Exercises, in the guidance notes, the second annotation set the tone: “It is not much knowledge that fills and satisfies the soul, but to feel and to taste things interiorly” (SE 2). According to Javier Melloni, these two verbs “to feel” and “to taste” summon the senses to “make tangible the intangible plan of the Spirit8.” The concept of “sentient intelligence,” proposed by Xavier Zubiri9, expresses this form of understanding that captures through the senses, organizes, and interiorizes the perception of reality.

“To feel [to exercise a sentient intelligence] and to taste things interiorly.” One might wonder why the verb “to taste” is added to the verb “to feel”? Why single out taste, as if it summed up all the senses? In fact, unlike sight and hearing, which refer to realities coming from outside,

This knowledge through “feeling” thus increases in the retreatant the union with Christ, the deeper reception of baptismal salvation. But Ignatius promotes this sentient intelligence because, for him, it is indispensable to the discernment of spirits. It helps to “feel and to recognize” the inner motions of consolation and desolation, “the good in order to welcome them, and the bad in order to reject them” (SE 211). This makes it possible to clear the way, to acquire inner freedom so as “to conquer oneself and to order one’s life without allowing oneself to be influenced in one’s decision by any disordered attachment,” to “seek and find the divine will” in all things (in all realities), and above all to find God “in the ordering of one’s life” (SE 1), the famous election.

This brings us to the last part of our exposition. How are we to use the senses in our relationship with God? By trusting them blindly, certain that they lead us to the divine? We still remember Descartes’ famous statement, still valid: “The senses deceive us.” The question of their conversion, of their evangelization, will be the last point of our reflection: how to evangelize our corporal senses so that they may become the best possible mediators between the outside and our interiority?

In the spiritual tradition, at least three kinds of “guard” are known: the guarding of thoughts, the guarding of the heart, and the guarding of the senses. The posture of the three guards can be summarized by the well-known story of Evagrius Ponticus. He recounts that we are like millers welcoming peasants and their loads of grain at the door of our mill. The miller takes great care that the good grain is not mixed with tares or bad grain. He questions each one: Are you friend or foe? In the same way, each person must stand at the door of his heart and carefully examine the movements born of the thoughts that come knocking at the door. “Be the gatekeeper of your heart and let no thought enter without questioning it11!”

The art of discipleship requires discipline, a progressive purification of the senses, striving not to capitulate before ease or sensuality, rather moving toward an ecology of images, sobriety in food, healthy relaxation rather than procrastination where a bulimia of the senses can arise, ultimately leading to their atrophy. For this evangelization of the senses, I call upon two contemporary voices: those of Sister Catherine Aubin and Father Amedeo Cencini.

1. Catherine Aubin: Loving and Praying with the Five Senses

Sister Catherine Aubin, a Dominican, wrote in 2010 The Windows of the Soul: Loving and Praying with the Five Senses12. She asks how to open the senses, as windows of the soul, in order to raise sensible life to the level of spiritual experience and to see them refined by one another. Let us take each sense one by one.

Hearing: we are witnesses to the ascetic dimension involved in the art of truly listening to the Word of God or listening attentively to the words of our brothers and sisters, listening to them to the very end. And what joy, when we are trained in such listening, both for them and for us. It is said that hearing is the most vulnerable of the senses, but the most decisive. “Take care how you listen,” says Jesus (Lk 8:18). The world’s happiness is found here.

Sight is the sense that touches memory the most. Here too, spiritual combat can be serious, especially in this consumer culture that relies on the stimulation of emotions and the gaze to sell.

More than the others, taste perhaps confronts us more with the choice: to savor or to devour. It has the power of being at the threshold between outside and inside. It is the one that proposes a “pause on the image.”

Touch corresponds most of all to the truth or falsity of fraternal and social bonds (though all four other senses also contribute), when, for example, I console someone with the truth of tact, making just the right gesture.

Smell invites discernment, in an atmosphere often confusing for the other senses, between good and bad odors. To have a nose, to sense situations, to have good sense, the sensus fidei: these expressions suggest what its development can bring.

For my part, I would add to Catherine Aubin’s reflections that the senses are “windows of the soul for loving and praying” thanks to the opening of the four books of our lives: the book of the Word of God and the sacraments; the book of our sacred history, what we have or have not created with others; the book of nature, of creation; and finally, the book of art, of human creation. When these four books are opened by the senses, communication—even communion—with God, prayer, can occur. Ultimately, with regard to our senses, we are like children in music school who, as they advance in their solfège classes, acquire more or less musical ear. Or like the artist who, to paint, spends hours contemplating landscapes or masterpieces in the Louvre. The evangelization of the senses passes through their development.

2. Amedeo Cencini: Evangelizing Our Sensibility

Father Amedeo Cencini, a Canossian and professor at the Salesian University of Rome, wrote in 2019 Evangelizing Our Sensibility to Learn to Discern13. He describes sensibility as the precious energy that makes us vibrate before life, but one that is fundamentally ambivalent. It can lead us toward good or toward its opposite; it can reinforce in us a tendency either self-referential or resolutely open to the other. He repeats the age-old, fundamental truth that it is possible, and even necessary, to intervene on sensations, to educate them, especially when they hinder our spiritual growth. The goal is above all to learn to welcome and to promote sensations that are in conformity with our deepest identity. This education presupposes converting or evangelizing not only the senses, but also what they lead to: feelings, emotions, and affections, so that this long and patient education truly reaches the place of desire, the heart, in the biblical sense of the word.

In his demonstration, let us especially retain this link between the senses and the heart. To speak of the heart, I have long kept in memory the excellent definition from the encyclical Lumen fidei, which, to my regret, was not taken up as such in Dilexit nos:

We might also add that the heart is the place of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The aim of educating our five senses is indeed to lead to the heart. Here is how Cencini, in summary, describes the link between the senses and the heart: the education of sensibility begins with the senses, for they are our first contact with reality; the information they gather is the raw material from which the whole chain begins: sensations, then emotions which express our response to those sensations. Then emotions give rise to feelings, which orient the emotions, providing a form of stability at the inner level. Here, the education of our interiority can be focused, for feelings provide a certain orientation of the inner world. Feelings then give rise to affections, which are deep and stable bonds. Sensations, emotions, and partly feelings express sensibility in its reactive phase, whereas feelings and affections manifest sensibility as a proactive force that discerns and decides the path to take. They are close to that mysterious path which is the path of desire, and of the heart. This proactive force is a kind of underground river. Sometimes it surfaces at the level of full consciousness, but most often it moves incognito. And yet, it must be educated.

In this incredible chain leading to the heart, what role do the senses play? They resemble a drawbridge: they are external and internal. They are a key element of the whole structure, for everything that arrives in the heart has first passed through the drawbridge of the senses. Which means in return that, like the heart, in their own way, our senses are calibrated to truth, beauty, and goodness; they spontaneously tend toward what is true, beautiful, and good, despite their ambivalence. We thus better understand why in this chain we have just described they still have, more than ever, their place in praying activity.

Conclusion: “Enkindle Our Senses with Your Light”

By way of conclusion, let us look at two verses taken from hymns to which we may no longer pay much attention.

First, the Veni Creator. In this hymn we sing, “Accende lumen sensibus,” “Enkindle our senses with your light.” This petition can be interpreted as the vocation of our body, our soul, and our spirit to welcome the Spirit of the Risen Jesus. This verse reaffirms in its own way what our journey has sought to affirm: there are not, on the one side, our corporal senses, and on the other, our spiritual senses. To speak of “spiritual senses” is not simply to use a metaphorical expression, a mere manner of speaking. We can, I believe, dare to propose a true analogy between the spiritual senses and our agents of external sensory perception. Just as our intelligence, our will, our imagination, our affections, our emotions need to be channeled, stimulated, educated, evangelized, so too our senses, as “shores of the heart,” “drawbridges of the soul,” must be fully integrated into spiritual experience, before being one day fully enkindled in the light of the resurrection. Enkindle us with your light!

The second hymn is by Didier Rimaud, Jesus Who Set My Heart Aflame, in which we sing: “Turn my senses inward, force my steps to adventure.” The poetry of Didier Rimaud’s hymns is sometimes a little complex. But it is worth looking closely at this verse. In fact, Rimaud gives voice to one of the two disciples of Emmaus. This disciple unexpectedly experienced the Risen One. Without his reason knowing it, on the road, he listened, with his heart burning, to the man of Easter morning. He breathed him in, perhaps touched him; at the inn, he saw him for the instant of a flash. Later, he recalls what we could call the unforgettable experience of the senses. Long afterwards, he makes this prayer: “Risen Christ, turn my senses inward.” What I once experienced through my external senses is stored in my affective memory; grant me, through this burning memory, the grace to “force my steps to adventure,” that is, to engage my freedom, guided by this inner sensing, on your paths, to discern, to choose according to God. Just as I ran on Easter evening to my brothers, make me run, like the beloved in the Song of Songs, at the fragrance of your perfumes. This verse sums up, all by itself, the role of the senses in spiritual life, according to Ignatius of Loyola.

Certainly, many other paths remain to be explored. The gift of tears, which some consider a sixth spiritual sense, manifests this going outside of oneself where interiority overflows into a tangible sign, united to divine compassion. It illustrates in its own way the depth of the soul’s movements under the action of the Spirit. The same is true for the theology of tenderness, so dear to Pope Francis, which deserves to be fully integrated into this reflection: it touches upon what is most incarnate, most relational, most human in the spiritual senses. For, in the pope’s own words, it is “the beauty of feeling loved by God and the beauty of feeling that we love in God’s name15.” Thus, by restoring their rightful place to the senses in spiritual life—not to absolutize them but to transfigure them—we relearn to welcome God not only in reason, in thought, but in the living flesh of our being, where he meets and transforms us.