|From Joann Wolski Conn (ed.), Women’s Spirituality: Resources for Christian Development. (Paulist,
1986), pp. 226-232.
Stages of Faith
Stage I Intuitive-Projective faith is the fantasy-filled, imitative phase in which the child can be
powerfully and permanently influenced by examples, moods, actions and stories of the visible faith of primally related adults.
The stage most typical of the child of three to seven, it is marked by a relative fluidity of thought patterns.
The child is continually encountering novelties for which no stable operations of knowing have been formed. The imaginative
processes underlying fantasy are unrestrained and uninhibited by logical thought. In league with forms of knowing dominated
by perception, imagination in this stage is extremely productive of long-lasting images and feelings (positive and negative)
that later, more stable and self-reflective valuing and thinking will have to order and sort out. This is the stage of first
self-awareness. The "self-aware" child is egocentric as regards the perspectives of others. Here we find first awarenesses
of death and sex and of the strong taboos by which cultures and families insulate those powerful areas.
The gift or emergent strength of this stage is the birth of imagination, the ability to unify and grasp the
experience-world in powerful images and as presented in stories that register the child's intuitive understandings and feelings
toward the ultimate conditions of existence.
The dangers in this stage arise from the possible "possession" of the child's imagination by unrestrained
images of terror and destructiveness, or from the witting or unwitting exploitation of her or his imagination in the reinforcement
of taboos and moral or doctrinal expectations.
The main factor precipitating transition to the next stage is the emergence of concrete operational thinking.
Affectively, the resolution of Oedipal issues or their submersion in latency are important accompanying factors. At the heart
of the transition is the child's growing concern to know how things are and to clarify for him- or herself the bases of distinctions
between what is real and what only seems to be.
Stage 2 Mythic-Literal faith is the stage in which the person begins to take on for him- or herself
the stories, beliefs and observances that symbolize belonging to his or her community. Beliefs are appropriated with literal
interpretations, as are moral rules and attitudes. Symbols are taken as one-dimensional and literal in meaning. In this stage
the rise of concrete operations leads to the curbing and ordering of the previous stage's imaginative composing of the world.
The episodic quality of Intuitive-Projective faith gives way to a more linear, narrative construction of coherence and meaning.
Story becomes the major way of giving unity and value to experience. This is the faith stage of the school child (though we
sometimes find the structures dominant in adolescents and in adults). Marked by increased accuracy in taking the perspective
of other persons, those in Stage 2 compose a world based on reciprocal fairness and an immanent justice based on reciprocity.
The actors in their cosmic stories are anthropomorphic. They can be affected deeply and powerfully by symbolic and dramatic
materials and can describe in endlessly detailed narrative what has occurred. They do not, however, step back from the flow
of stories to formulate reflective, conceptual meanings. For this stage the meaning is both carried and "trapped" in the narrative.
The new capacity or strength in this stage is the rise of narrative and the emergence of story, drama and
myth as ways of finding and giving coherence to experience.
The limitations of literalness and an excessive reliance upon reciprocity as a principle for constructing
an ultimate environment can result either in an overcontrolling, stilted perfectionism or "works righteousness" or in their
opposite, an abasing sense of badness embraced because of mistreatment, neglect or the apparent disfavor of significant others.
A factor initiating transition to Stage 3 is the implicit clash or contradictions in stories that leads to
reflection on meanings. The transition to formal operational thought makes such reflection possible and necessary. Previous
literalism breaks down; new "cognitive conceit" (Elkind) leads to disillusionment with previous teachers and teachings. Conflicts
between authoritative stories (Genesis on creation versus evolutionary theory) must be faced. The emergence of mutual interpersonal
perspective taking ("I see you seeing me; I see me as you see me; I see you seeing me seeing you.") creates the need for a
more personal relationship with the unifying power of the ultimate environment.
In Stage 3 Synthetic-Conventional faith, a person's experience of the world now extends beyond the
family. A number of spheres demand attention: family, school or work, peers, street society and media, and perhaps religion.
Faith must provide a coherent orientation in the midst of that more complex and diverse range of involvements. Faith must
synthesize values and information; it must provide a basis for identity and outlook.
Stage 3 typically has its rise and ascendancy in adolescence, but for many adults it becomes a permanent place
of equilibrium. It structures the ultimate environment in interpersonal terms. Its images of unifying value and power derive
from the extension of qualities experienced in personal relationships. It is a "conformist" stage in the sense that it is
acutely tuned to the expectations and judgments of significant others and as yet does not have a sure enough grasp on its
own identity and autonomous judgment to construct and maintain an independent perspective. While beliefs and values are deeply
felt, they typically are tacitly held-the person "dwells" in them and in the meaning world they mediate. But there has not
been occasion to step outside them to reflect on or examine them explicitly or systematically. At Stage 3 a person has an
"ideology," a more or less consistent clustering of values and beliefs, but he or she has not objectified it for examination
and in a sense is unaware of having it. Differences of outlook with others are experienced as differences in "kind" of person.
Authority is located in the incumbents of traditional authority roles (if perceived as personally worthy) or in the consensus
of a valued, face-to-face group.
The emergent capacity of this stage is the forming of a personal myth-the myth of one's own becoming in identity
and faith, incorporating one's past and anticipated future in an image of the ultimate environment unified by characteristics
The dangers or deficiencies in this stage are twofold. The expectations and evaluations of others can be so
compellingly internalized (and sacralized) that later autonomy of judgment and action can be jeopardized; or interpersonal
betrayals can give rise either to nihilistic despair about a personal principle of ultimate being or to a compensatory intimacy
with God unrelated to mundane relations
Factors contributing to the breakdown of Stage 3 and to readiness for transition may include: serious clashes
or contradictions between valued authority sources; marked changes, by officially sanctioned leaders, or policies or practices
previously deemed sacred and unbreachable (for example, in the Catholic church changing the mass from Latin to the vernacular,
or no longer requiring abstinence from meat on Friday); the encounter with experiences or perspectives that lead to critical
reflection on how one's beliefs and values have formed and changed, and on how "relative" they are to one's particular group
or background. Frequently the experience of "leaving home"--emotionally or physically, or both--precipitates the kind of examination
of self, background, and lifeguiding values that gives rise to stage transition at this point.
The movement from Stage 3 to Stage 4 Individuative-Reflective faith is particularly critical for it
is in this transition that the late adolescent or adult must begin to take seriously the burden of responsibility for his
or her own commitments, lifestyle, beliefs and attitudes. Where genuine movement toward stage 4 is underway the person must
face certain unavoidable tensions: individuality versus being defined
by a group or group membership; subjectivity and the power of one's strongly felt but unexamined feelings versus objectivity
and the requirement of critical reflection; self-fulfillment or self-actualization as a primary concern versus service to
and being for others; the question of being committed to the relative versus struggle with the possibility of an absolute.
Stage 4 most appropriately takes form in young adulthood (but let us remember that many adults do not construct
it and that for a significant group it emerges only in the mid-thirties or forties). This stage is marked by a double development.
The self, previously sustained in its identity and faith compositions by an interpersonal circle of significant others, now
claims an identity no longer defined by the composite of one's roles or meanings to others. To sustain that new identity it
composes a meaning frame conscious of its own boundaries and inner connections and aware of itself as a "world view." Self
(identity) and outlook (world view) are differentiated from those of others and become acknowledged factors in the reactions,
interpretations and judgments one makes on the actions of the self and others. It expresses its intuitions of coherence in
an ultimate environment in terms of an explicit system of meanings. Stage 4 typically translates symbols into conceptual meanings.
This is a "demythologizing" stage. It is likely to attend minimally to unconscious factors influencing its judgments and behavior.
Stage 4's ascendant strength has to do with its capacity for critical reflection on identity (self) and outlook
(ideology). Its dangers inhere in its strengths: an excessive confidence in the conscious mind and in critical thought and
a kind of second narcissism in which the now clearly bounded, reflective self overassimilates "reality" and the perspectives
of others into its own world view.
Restless with the self-images and outlook maintained by Stage 4, the person ready for transition finds him-
or herself attending to what may feel like anarchic and disturbing inner voices. Elements from a childish past, images and
energies from a deeper self, a gnawing sense of the sterility and flatness of the meanings one serves any or all of these
may signal readiness for something new. Stories, symbols, myths and paradoxes from one's own or other traditions may insist
on breaking in upon the neatness of the previous faith. Disillusionment with one's compromises and recognition that life is
more complex than Stage 4's logic of clear distinctions and abstract concepts can comprehend, press one toward a more dialectical
and multileveled approach to life truth.
Stage 5 Conjunctive faith involves the integration into self and outlook of much that was suppressed
or unrecognized in the interest of Stage 4's self-certainty and conscious cognitive and affective adaptation to reality. This
stage develops a "second naivete'' (Ricoeur) in which symbolic power is reunited with conceptual meanings. Here there must
also be a new reclaiming and reworking of one's past. There must be an opening to the voices of one's "deeper self." Importantly,
this involves a critical recognition of one's social unconscious-the myths, ideal images and prejudices built deeply into
the self-system by virtue of one's nurture within a particular social class, religious tradition, ethnic group or the like.
Unusual before mid-life, Stage 5 knows the sacrament of defeat and the reality of irrevocable commitments
and acts. What the previous stage struggled to clarify, in terms of the boundaries of self and outlook, this stage now makes
porous and permeable. Alive to paradox and the truth in apparent contradictions, this stage strives to unify opposites in
mind and experience. It generates and maintains vulnerability to the strange truths of those who are "other." Ready for closeness
to that which is different and threatening to self and outlook (including new depths of experience in spirituality and religious
revelation), this stage's commitment to justice is freed from the confines of tribe, class, religious community or nation.
And with the seriousness that can arise when life is more than half over, this stage is ready to spend and be spent for the
cause of conserving and cultivating the possibility of others' generating identity and meaning.
The new strength of this stage comes in the rise of the ironic imagination-a capacity to see and be in one's
or one's group's most powerful meanings, while simultaneously recognizing that they are relative, partial and inevitably distorting
apprehensions of transcendent reality. Its danger lies in the direction of a paralyzing passivity or inaction, giving rise
to complacency or cynical withdrawal, due to its paradoxical understanding of truth.
Stage 5 can appreciate symbols, myths and rituals (its own and others') because it has been grasped, in some
measure, by the depth of reality to which they refer. It also sees the divisions of the human family vividly because it has
been apprehended by the possibility (and imperative) of an inclusive community of being. But this stage remains divided. It
lives and acts between an untransformed world and a transforming vision and loyalties. In some few cases this division yields
to the call of the radical actualization that we call Stage 6.
Stage 6 is exceedingly rare. The persons best described by it have generated faith compositions in
which their felt sense of an ultimate environment is inclusive of all being. They have become incarnators and actualizers
of the spirit of an inclusive and fulfilled human community.
They are "contagious" in the sense that they create zones of liberation from the social, political, economic
and ideological shackles we place and endure on human futurity. Living with felt participation in a power that unifies and
transforms the world, Universalizers are often experienced as subversive of the structures (including religious structures)
by which we sustain our individual and corporate survival, security and significance. Many persons in this stage die at the
hands of those whom they hope to change. Universalizers are often more honored and revered after death than during their lives.
The rare persons who may be described by this stage have a special grace that makes them seem more lucid, more simple, and
yet somehow more fully human than the rest of us. Their community is universal in extent. Particularities are cherished because
they are vessels of the universal, and thereby valuable apart from any utilitarian considerations. Life is both loved and
held to loosely. Such persons are ready for fellowship with persons at any of the other stages and from any other faith tradition.