Contemplation on the Roads
midway through the journey
[Image: “View of Church Lane, Bristol,” attributed to Robert Dixon, 1820s-30s?, courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Rosenwald Collection. In the public domain.]
Before saying too much more about ascesis, a subject on which as a privileged contemporary person I am comically ill qualified to hold forth, I want to be sure not to lose the thread of natural and supernatural contemplation that concerns us more closely. This thread is the clue that leads us out of the labyrinth; the main hope with which, if we lose contact, any secondary project of self-limiting and self-discipline will soon cease even to appear to make any sense. To keep hold of it, let’s turn back to Maritain’s essay “Contemplation on the Roads.”
We find him there describing how, in some of its seasons, the Church has encouraged the habit of thinking that the best way of knowing God is to pull away from the world and into seclusion. In Maritain’s time as in ours, the pendulum swing is almost all the other way. As you might remember, Maritain encourages us to look for the advantages to contemplation that a life in the world offers—the things we have the chance to see, and to do for others, that are simply not possible in a cloistered environment, even as the cloister makes possible a quiet and a consistency of rhythm to which the outside world does not have access.
In earlier centuries, as Maritain tells it, when religious orders and houses were much more numerous and commonplace, the vocation of lay people was considered “imperfect.” Their only job, he quips, was “to stay that way; to live a good worldly life, not over-pious, and solidly planted in social naturalism (above all in that of family ambitions).” Now, though, a great perception of the universal call to holiness has arisen. This means not that everybody is already holy no matter what but that everybody can and should try to reach for holiness—that is neither some vague and naturalistic “wholeness” nor some surface piety but the deep and concrete specificity of the inner life of God—no matter their circumstances: “The precept to tend toward the perfection of charity applies to all.”
It's worth talking more about what Maritain means by charity. For many of us this word still has its Dickensian smack of gifts made to those living in poverty, with the idea of benefiting them rather than ourselves, and without ulterior motive. Such gifts are all to the good. Yet they are not all that charity means. Even if we were to transform the world into “a final reign of justice, peace, and human [fulfillment],” this would not, for Maritain, mean the fulfillment of charity. Human development in itself is good, but it is a good for the sake of the human meeting with, and transformation in, the love of God.
This does not mean for Maritain, either, a “cosmo-christic messianism” in which the perfected human person eventually becomes “the spirit of the world”—it seems fairly evident that in this phrase Maritain is registering his disagreement with a Teilhardian version of spiritualization. Instead, Maritain wishes for us to “work in the world for the good of the world” “with awakened understanding, as free agents capable of universal purposes”—but not just any universal purposes. Rather, he sees us as “free associates” in the service of Divine Providence: working for the joyful flourishing of, rather than at cross purposes with, the natures that Providence created.
Maritain wants to see us “keeping our heads”—using a clear and patient human reason to discern rational ends, without rushing, without obfuscation. Yet not ever, not for a second does Maritain expect human reason to take precedence over Divine Reason. If reason does that, it loses its character as reason. It becomes self-serving, self-aggrandizing, and as such self-destructive. “A power over nature and a power over history” will do us no good if we use those powers as humans have historically used power, “to lord it over others.” Rather, as Mary sang and as Christ gently asked, Maritain would want to see the wretched lifted up, the haughty cast down, and the powerful acting as the servants of all.
In light of this, Maritain cautions us against any purely temporal grand narrative of progress, if that progress is supposed to be in itself salvific. “We must be ready to suffer anything for justice’s sake in the temporal struggle, but this struggle does not claim to eliminate… evil” for once and all. Only the return of Christ, with “a new earth and a new heaven, and the resurrection of the dead,” can do that.
And Maritain seems to work within a lively, though implicit, awareness that pseudochristic and possibly antichristic figures will try to arrogate the real Christ’s attributes to themselves. He wants us to stay alert and not to be deceived—above all not to unwittingly lapse into complicity with evil from an excess of naïvete. He thinks we can and should “oppose as much as possible the progress of evil, and … accelerate as much as possible the progress of good in the world,” but if we expect to have any success we cannot forget that we are not, ourselves, messiahs. “Without the strengthening assistance of Christ’s grace our nature is too weak to carry… out” any program of justice, no matter how good: “Justice without love is inhuman, and love … is itself fragile without theological charity. Without the love of charity, work as we might, we will work nothing.”
This is as true in matters of art as in matters of justice. If Pieper is right, and I (too obviously) think he is, that “only the lover sings,” Maritain is equally right that this is because it is only the lover who sees. Maritain quotes the spiritual writer Lallemant* as saying that “With contemplation we will do more in a month, for ourselves and for others, than we would have been able to do without it in ten years.”
Imperfect as I am, I have experienced that. It’s possible you have too. Those moments when you’ve worked and worked and nothing has come together except an increasing tangle of forces and influences—and then, for no clear reason and without effort from you, the knots all begin to undo themselves, and it becomes immediately evident which parts of the puzzle belong where, and how, and why: I don’t believe those happen by accident or mere luck. Something greater is at work there. Call it magical thinking if you like the phrase (I don’t); there is no “magic” as such about it. There is no straining, no grasping, only a great clarity and calm, even in the midst of outer chaos. And it occurs. It cannot be chosen, except in the choice to be ready for it.
*As far as I can figure out, the Lallemant in question seems to be the seventeenth-century French Jesuit who stayed in his home country to teach and write, and not one of the other three seventeenth-century French Jesuits of the same last name who traveled to Canada, one of whom was martyred there.