“Rue Saint-Jacques,” Charles Marville, 1864/67?, courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Robert B. Menschel Fund. Image is in the public domain.
[A note: This deep-dive series, on Maritain and other writers on contemplation, is going to continue through Lent. To stay true to plan, I wrote most of it well in advance because I knew that this Lent would call for a lot of time spent elsewhere. After Easter I plan to start another deep dive on craft and vision, for those who might want to rejoin us at that point.]
For writers, the word is the matter of our art. So what do we do when language itself limits our ability to communicate? When the sign does not signify? When our multiple discourse communities, no longer simply reflections of fractures in shared vision of the common good, are themselves broken from the inside out?
I dwelt on this both before and after the last post, “Contemplation Is For Everyone.” Everyone is a lot of people; everyone covers a lot of human particularity. So it’s not possible to presume the same words suggest the same associations to all of them, the “them” that is “us,” because there is only “us”: a single humanity, sharing a single human condition, across any other sort of barrier anyone might want to name. Any other “us” group—we educated people, we enlightened ones, we believers—has to acknowledge its relation to this prior, perennial loyalty.
At the same time, a lot of anxious effort in life goes into reassuring the people closest to us, by means of many subtle or overt yet mostly nonverbal signals, that we still belong to their smaller, more circumscribed we. When this signaling effort creeps into our language it only too easily destroys meaning in the very effort to create it.
Words are fragile objects, easily smeared out of their good reputations, easily shamed into believing in their own guilt by association. Words are social creatures, both in their popularity and in their potential for pariah status: Convince enough people that a word has been used to perform or to license wrongdoing, and soon enough no cautious person will want to be seen within half a mile of it—even if the word itself was not at fault but was only being held prisoner and abused, even if the word holds a key that would unlock the healing of millions.
This brings us back to the question, which touches language as it touches everything else, of the real. As the Contemplative Realism manifesto reminds us, “to ignore the question is to risk settling for a life seen through a limited lens that cannot grasp truth’s terrible splendor.” To speak as though we cannot see what we can see—or as though we can see what we cannot—shutters the lens down to total obscurity.
If we use words carelessly enough for long enough, we can break them. If we keep on doing it regardless, we can break ourselves.
This is dizzying. The responsibility it implies is heavy. And so it is some help, it is some comfort, to learn that so great a mind as Maritain’s believes that the very weight of the world’s routines can, possibly, be a help and not a hindrance to clearer vision.
I have been returning and returning to his “Contemplation on the Roads” passage, written half by himself and half by his wife Raissa. She had died by the time he was putting the text together, but her voice lives in the long passages from her journals and unpublished papers, which Maritain quotes because they make his points better than he could himself.
In one such passage Raissa writes that any hope for a future of peace dwells in people who consent to practice love for God and for each other, in the context of interconnected lives, with “a constant attention to the presence of Jesus and fraternal charity.” This practice, she says, would become possible despite lack of time and (apparent) lack of opportunity if we could learn, first, to set aside time for silence, and then, to perceive God in others wherever we meet them.
In this way the silence inside us would make contact with the noise of the world so as to still and quiet it. Our silence would also make contact with that silence inside others in which the voice of God can be heard: “It is in the poor human clay that we learn then to know Jesus and many of his secrets.” (238) Dwelling in the midst of humanity’s brokenness and breakneck pacing, the Maritains want to tell us, might not prevent us from clearing space for contemplation. It might even offer some advantages.
The first advantage is, maybe, obvious—that living in the world lets people keep in direct, frequent contact with those who will never know any other way of living besides the world’s conditions. Maritain writes: “it is for them that Christ came and that he died on the cross, and he does not cease to love them and to will their salvation, and his work of redemption continued by the Church cannot be in vain.”
Another advantage is the freedom to respond in surprising ways to “the desires of the soul and the response that they receive.” A benefit, and a drawback, of cloistered contemplation is that lives that practice it all come to look very much the same (from the outside; personal differences stay there, just backgrounded). Contemplation on the roads, by contrast, lets people live—and tell—a wide, wild variety of external human stories, all of which still lead together to the Good.
Then, this life opens up a way of taking part in God’s saving work, as “developed in time.” No matter where, people who live in a way open to grace find that that grace is not just a gift for themselves. It also lets them give something to others without having to be at agitated, performative pains to appear generous; possibly without even being aware of it.
Still another advantage is that we arrive at the compassionate acceptance of human nature that Raissa Maritain describes this way: “I am coming now to take humanity quietly—for what it is. Without exclamations—regrets—sighs—and groans. … God knows what he permits. He is not like a man who regretfully permits what he cannot prevent. He has let men go their own way armed with their freedom—and they go it….”
Suffering, as Raissa with her frequent illnesses knew well, is not avoidable even if we squeeze our eyes tight shut, make all the right choices, and put up walls to shut out the noise. Everyone suffers. When we do not consent to bear the suffering that travels alongside grace, we end up suffering from our own flaws instead. We bear the consequences of those flaws in a pain whose only virtue is the force of our sheer aversion to it. That force might, if we are fortunate, push us away from our mistakes and toward a better way.
Even so, Raissa insists, “The face of the law and its rigor, the face of suffering and death is not the face of God; God is love.” He does not torment our consciences the way we torment them ourselves, or the way others torment them for us. This pain, too, he took on from love, so that we could take on His nature which is beyond nature.
Like an eclipse, this is too bright to look at directly. And long use and misuse have worn away the sense of the words until we can barely read them. If we are even going to try to get to the core of a text like Raissa’s, we are going to need fresh thoughts, a clean heart, new eyes.
Domine, ut videam** is a transformative, and shattering, and healing prayer when you dwell with it. In my experience it does not rest long unanswered. And literary art, oftener than we might imagine, can help to answer it.
* “What did you see along the way?” (a line from an Easter hymn which is still weeks away; can’t help anticipating; can’t resist the Latin, either).
** “Lord, that I may see” (Lk 18:41).