CONTEMPLATION Kevin Hart

[00:00:01][music] As good a place as any to begin thinking about prayer and contemplation is by thinking about the origins of the words.

[00:00:23]The word prayer derives from the Latin prari which means to ask, to beg, to intreat. And the word enters English in the religious sense we use today in the early 14th century. The word contemplation, however, comes from the Latin word templum. The templum was a rectangular space drawn in the sky above the north end of the forum in Rome. It was there that the college of organs met each with a lutius a sort of short bishop's crook to determine if there were auspicious signs for winter crops or spring crops or military campaigns.

[00:01:01]The signs were a sort of birds which flow into the templum and from which direction. An eagle was a very auspicious sign since it was Jupiter's bird. But an owl was a inospicious sign since it was an omen of death.

[00:01:17]If we look to the Greek, we find that the word prou is used for prayer which joins together uh pros meaning towards and suk meaning wish. To pray then is to offer one's wishes toward another including a god.

[00:01:36]The Greek word we translate by contemplation is theoria which means spectacle.

[00:01:43]One beholds a spectacle from a distance.

[00:01:46]The word itself stems from the Greek theorus which names an envoy sent by Apollus to a religious festival elsewhere in Greece or sometimes in Egypt.

[00:02:00]The theorist would observe the religious festivals and report back to the pace on innovations in liturgy on new gods and so forth.

[00:02:09]The leaders of the polace would decide if the information should become public.

[00:02:15]If it was decided that it shouldn't be, the theorist would be sworn to secrecy.

[00:02:20]If he betrayed the secret, he might be killed. At first, the theory were paid by the polace to visit religious festivals.

[00:02:29]Thereafter, men of independent means also became theori so they could observe the festivals regardless of the decisions of the polace about what could be publicly revealed.

[00:02:42]Ylicas in his book on the Pythagorean way of life speaks of the theorus as the freest of men since he could observe everything while not having to participate in anything.

[00:02:56]The motif of freedom in contemplation has lasted throughout the centuries.

[00:03:03]The early church learned deeply from the Greek understanding of prayer and contemplation combining with Hebraic understandings of prayer and meditation.

[00:03:14]The Hebrew teila combines a sense of conversation with God which also has an element of self- evvaluation.

[00:03:22]Thus, we might see the early church beginning to think of prayer in a reflexive way on petitions God while also hearing one's own petitions and reflecting on their justice or lack of it. In praying, one always learns that one does not pray well. A supplement of further prayer is always needed, no matter how surely one grows in prayer.

[00:03:48]Of course, prayer in the Jewish world was broader than petition. It also included lament and praise.

[00:03:56]There's no Hebrew word which can quite be translated by contemplation.

[00:04:02]Although there are several which can be rendered by meditation.

[00:04:07]If we think our contemplation enters Christianity more surely, we find a couple of things.

[00:04:14]First, the church takes as the absolute model the patoster of Jesus with its spiritual requests and its mundane requests.

[00:04:25]Throughout Jesus asks his audience to think radically about prayer. It's not just about requests but about the disposition of one's soul.

[00:04:36]There are various important commentaries on the prayer. The most important ones being by Augustine and Gregory of Nissa.

[00:04:45]Second, as monasticism started to thrive in the early centuries of the church, the church adapted several of the ancient stoic and Epicurian spiritual exercises, removing them from their original contexts and placing them within the context of prayer.

[00:05:03]Thus, one might uh premeditate the advent of death or disaster and combine it with a request to God to keep one from being exposed to danger.

[00:05:14]Or one might engage in overflight, imagining oneself being looked down upon from a great height. The exercise shows that one's troubles are momentary and small in the great scale of things. It doesn't diminish the human situation but merely alleviates the pain. In its Christian form, overlight allows one to imagine God or one's guardian angel or a particular saint looking down on one.

[00:05:44]So, it's comforting as well as chasening.

[00:05:48]It's only with Gregory the Great's Moralia in Job written in the late 6th century, his immense commentary on the book of Job, that we find a detailed account of contemplation in the Christian mode.

[00:06:01]The oddity here is that Gregory was reading Job in the Vulgate and developing his account of uh contemplation from the Latin, not from the Hebrew. So although the early medieval understanding of contemplation is based on Jewish scripture, it has no roots in Hebrew, the contemplative dimension of prayer is Latin and Christian, not Hebrew and Jewish.

[00:06:28]Even before Gregory developed contemplation by way of Job, it was proposed as a practice by St. Benedict in the early 6th century by way of lectio deina or sacred reading.

[00:06:41]This mode of prayer is still used today.

[00:06:44]It's deeply embedded in the reading of scripture.

[00:06:48]One chooses a biblical book as the basis of one's leure and each day reads just two, three or four verses.

[00:06:57]The first stage is lecture reading. One reads the verses not in any hurry seeking to understand their plain sense.

[00:07:07]Then one engages in meditatio allowing one's heart and mind to roam freely across scripture and elsewhere. The church fathers for example to see how the verses being read are pondered elsewhere.

[00:07:21]One chews on the verses monks used to say of this stage of the prayer.

[00:07:29]Once one comes to the natural end of this stage one passes to a ratio. one prays to God, applying what one has gathered from meditatio to one's own life and situation, giving thanks and seeking grace for the troubles of life.

[00:07:47]Finally, one passes to the last phase of the exercise, contemplatio, and here one asks nothing of God. One simply rests in his love, offering oneself in love fully to him.

[00:08:03]Delight is one of the defining trades of contemplation and this is so not only of Christian contemplation but also of earlier Greek versions of it.

[00:08:15]Yet one should not assume too readily that everyone is ready for delight. Many people including monks and nuns in contemplative orders practice meditation rather than contemplation at first.

[00:08:29]It's common for people to find the passage from meditation to contemplation very challenging and some people keep slipping back into meditative practices.

[00:08:41]This should be no surprise since it's easier for the mind to focus on an image or a group of images than on an emptiness crossed and recrossed by love.

[00:08:53]I'll come back to this issue in a moment.

[00:08:56]Toward the end of the Nicabian ethics, Aristotle observes that the philosopher and the statesman are the most fortunate of men since they can allow themselves to contemplate the structures of reality.

[00:09:10]Social reality for the statesman, the cosmos for the philosopher is in tune with Aristotle when he speaks of the theorus as the freest of men.

[00:09:23]You'll notice how different Aristotle's sense of theoria is from Plato's.

[00:09:28]For Plato in his dialogue, The Republic, one escapes the cave, the pregiven world in which one is chained to view only images, and finally leaves the darkness and sees the light, the forms. But when one returns to tell the truth to the others who are still chained in the cave, one is killed.

[00:09:49]Clearly Plato is thinking of what happened to Socrates who was executed supposedly for corrupting the youth of Athens but in truth for disturbing the citizens of Athens who are quite happy leaving the unexamined life.

[00:10:07]Aristotle shifts the emphasis in theoria.

[00:10:10]It is no longer subject to reforming the polace but is rather a private exercise.

[00:10:16]the reward for the philosopher or statesman for the hard work he's done in the day.

[00:10:23]Christianity inherits both the Platonic and the Aristotilian emphases.

[00:10:29]Contemplative prayer is undertaken to steady oneself in the world to strengthen oneself in the love of God and neighbor so that one might help others. Also though it's regarded as a private devotion to be practiced in the silence of one's own room.

[00:10:49]It's worthwhile now to take a step back and distinguish as far as one can meditation from contemplation and not only along the axis of Jewish and Christian practices.

[00:11:02]If we take our bearings from Evacrius Ponticus of the 4th century, we'll say that contemplation empties the mind of all images so that it can be occupied wholly and simply by God.

[00:11:16]Meditation is quite different. It ponders sacred images whether from the scriptures or from art and the mind is filled with images.

[00:11:28]The most familiar form of meditation in the Christian West are the spiritual exercises of Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits.

[00:11:40]Contemplation tends to be practiced by the more austere orders of the church such as the Cistersians, the Carthusians, the Trappists, the Carmelites, the Claire's.

[00:11:54]Of course, there are more modes of prayer than petition, meditation, and contemplation.

[00:12:00]They flourished in the church before Vatican 2, which tended to flatten out the great heritage of prayer in the Catholic world.

[00:12:09]Thus, while the meditative prayer known as the rosary is promoted, one finds no promotion of the prayer of associated with Bernard of Clairvo called consideratio.

[00:12:21]In considerio, one ponders whether one has fulfilled or one's duties to those over whom one has responsibility, one's children, one's students, and then whether one has fulfilled all that one owes to one's peers, one's spouse, one's colleagues, and then as before with respect to those who are placed above you, administrators, priests, bishops, and so on.

[00:12:50]Finally, one reflects on one's responsibilities to God.

[00:12:54]In this way, consideratio enables one to undergo a 360 degree self- evvaluation.

[00:13:02]One sees one's weaknesses, one's blind spots, and exactly where they are. It's an excellent preparation for the sacrament of confession.

[00:13:16]Thus far, I focused on prayer and contemplation entirely within religion, especially Christianity.

[00:13:23]However, neither of them stays holy within religion. There's an old usage of the word pray which serves as a request to another person. And there are poems which double as prayers and they're addressed to another, not necessarily God.

[00:13:40]The ode is a genre which lends itself to this sort of adaptation of prayer.

[00:13:46]Whether it be in a high mode like Keats or in a low mode like Nuda.

[00:13:52]In the 17th and 18th centuries there was a crisis in the church associated with a religious movement mainly in France, Italy and Spain called quietism. Here the impulse was to focus on contemplation in an extreme way listening for a divine voice that is hidden not overt that's to say as med mediated by scripture in the church.

[00:14:18]The consequence is that the church sought to replace contemplation especially in female religious houses with meditation a situation which lasted until the beginning of the 20th century.

[00:14:32]Only then does one find a flourish of publications about contemplation or as it was often called then mysticism.

[00:14:41]I prefer the word contemplation since mysticism is associated with psychic experiences which are quite rare among contemplatives.

[00:14:52]With Friedrich Schlamarker in the late 18th century, we get a sharp emphasis on experience as a religious category. And so it was perhaps inevitable that when contemplation was reclaimed at the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century, it was done so by way of experience.

[00:15:12]It became a matter of mystical experience and was often approached by way of the new science of psychology.

[00:15:21]This is the age of Rudolfph Otto's the idea of the holy 1917 of evil in underhill's book mysticism of 1914 and Baron von Hugle's the mystical element of religion of 1908.

[00:15:38]Yet if one reads the great contemplatives, one finds little attention to specific mystical experiences, and when they occur, little credence is given to them as regards them being indices of spiritual progress toward God.

[00:15:55]With the suppression of contemplation in Christian religious orders as well as with the leoty, contemplation did not go away, but it moved to the side as it were. One finds it entering philosophy, literature, and other cultural formations, including most recently medicine, sometimes by way of Buddhism.

[00:16:17]Thus, one sees contemplation becoming a theme in Kant, in Schopenhau, and in Hustle. One finds literary criticism focusing increasingly on lyric poems which are themselves often contemplative, gazing at phenomena without trying to look through them, keeping one's mind open and alert rather than closed down in a determinate judgment.

[00:16:43]In many ways, this attempt to use poetry as a way of contemplating reality, secular as well as religious, was restricted by what we call the hermeneutics of suspicion, in which judgments are made, which set the surface of the poem in tension with its supposed core.

[00:17:02]The guides to this practice of suspicious reading were Marx, Leecher, and Freud.

[00:17:09]Markx allowed us to see class conflicts at the heart of literature and art.

[00:17:16]Nature asked us to see power conflicts there. And Freud pointed out that human sexuality is everywhere apparent in literature and art.

[00:17:26]Students were trained to be suspicious about whatever they read. Yet this practice, very useful as it sometimes is, can be countered by hermeneutics of contemplation.

[00:17:38]which looks to another trio, Schopenhau, Ceridge, and Hussel.

[00:17:44]With Shopenhau, we're asked to look at something rather than through it. With Cage, we're invited to look beyond words to the ideas behind them. And with Husel, we're asked to adopt a metaphilosophical position, to ask, what does philosophy or theology or literary criticism do best?

[00:18:08]Husel's answer is that philosophy is not at heart a matter of criticism of critique or dialectic or analysis but rather contemplation.

[00:18:19]One contemplates the myriad ways in which noises correlates with noa.

[00:18:25]Let's take a moment to explain this a little.

[00:18:29]We have many attitudes and we have many mental modes. also teaches we live mainly in the natural attitude, the realm of common sense. But at times we shift into the practical attitude or the theoretical attitude or the aesthetic attitude and so on.

[00:18:49]This happens almost spontaneously.

[00:18:53]Imagine yourself at school. If you begin the day doing math, you'll quickly click into the theoretical attitude.

[00:19:02]But once you go to art class, you'll quickly slip into the aesthetic attitude.

[00:19:08]In the physics class, you'll time sometimes be in the practical attitude, sometimes in the theoretical attitude, and sometimes in the naturalistic attitude.

[00:19:18]And it's the same when one's out of school. Each and every day, we pass from one attitude, one mental framework to another. We do it so quickly and seamlessly that we hardly notice that it's occurring.

[00:19:34]Also, the mind has various modes of engagement with the world. Perception, memory, anticipation, fantasy, evaluation, and so on.

[00:19:45]Husul was intrigued by the endless ways in which our attitudes and modes of thought produce coralates and philosophy for him was in part an invitation to contemplate the endless world that's opened up to us by pondering the relations of noises and no.

[00:20:06]He thought that with phenomenology he'd uncovered a whole new field of infinite possibilities.

[00:20:12]And so he had the hermeneutics of contemplation learned from Cage, Shopenhau, and Husau among others.

[00:20:22]Specifically, it learns how to regard phenomena, including written texts, without premature reduction of their content to social or political concerns.

[00:20:34]When contemplating a poem, for example, one will spend less time digging into it, looking for something suppressed or hidden, than with the verbal play of the surface.

[00:20:46]One will read it less in a linear fashion than by way of circles and spirals.

[00:20:52]One will go around and around a particular line or a stanza or will spiral from the poem into another poem or another book and then return sometimes with new questions to put to the poem or a newfound appreciation of an aspect of it.

[00:21:10]If we read a poem attending to the attitudes it adopts and the different intentional modes it proposes, we'll go deeper into it than is possible by looking for purported social and political content.

[00:21:25]But contemplative reading requires focus and concentration. It's a new mode of close reading, one that uncovers layers and layers of sedimented meaning which evaded the new criticism and ideological criticism.

[00:21:42]Contemplative reading is today practiced in schools, in colleges, and at home, but it's still in its infancy.

[00:21:51]What we see though is that contemplation assumes many modes in the western intellectual tradition and that it never quite goes away even when it's not foregrounded in Christianity.