What Contemplation Brings In
A beginning
[Image: “Women from Arles in the Cloisters of Saint Tropheme,” 1852/54, Charles Negre, courtesy National Gallery of Art, Patrons’ Permanent Fund. Image is in the public domain.]
I have been avoiding addressing it. Why? Few topics hold more appeal. Yet I fear the temptation of talking sentimentality and obscurity about it, forgetting that what I understand is only the smallest sliver of what is there to be known.
Part of the problem lurks in style: how to be serious without being ponderous? But most of the challenge dwells in the content:
And with all this what have I said, my God and my Life and my sacred Delight? What can anyone say when he speaks of Thee? Yet woe to them that speak not of Thee at all, since those who say most are but mute. (St. Augustine, Confessions 1.IV)
Those of us who are not great saints (and I am not, though let’s not foreclose on the possibility that you might be) can do little but repeat what those wiser than us have said. Still we must work toward a sense of what can be said. We can, maybe, start edging our way into the question by engaging the charge that contemplation might somehow be selfish or self-directed, an activity of self-perfection whose main achievement is to make us neglect generous service to others.
With the world falling apart at the seams, in all of the ways it is inarguably falling apart, ought we not to be doing something about it: something concrete to improve just one other person’s life? How can we justify, instead, taking the time to sit there like some animate SETI array—at vast expense, no less, giving all the trouble that finicky high-maintenance equipment such as the human body always does give—waiting for some kind of signal from beyond?
Though this framing of the question is contemporary, the question itself is not exactly new. Writing in full consciousness of the nihilistic destructiveness of World War II, and the desperate needs of humanity calling out for help on all sides, Josef Pieper in Happiness and Contemplation asks:
How can we praise contemplation of this earthly creation when the ages, the present age and probably all ages, have been full of disorder, frightful injustice, hunger, painful deaths, oppression, and every form of human misery? Is it possible to keep in mind the actual history of mankind and at the same time speak of the happiness of intuition, of satiation and beatitude? Is this anything but flight from the real world, an attempt to render horrors innocuous, a form of self-deception and unrealistic idyllicism?
This is no straw specter, raised only to be punctured. It is a fair representation of the difficulty, with its full weight, such as we feel it in both historical and fictional accounts of that era and of our own. Pieper does not sidestep it. He walks into the dark with us. He entertains the possibility, even likelihood, of a meaningless cosmos. The only possible way to justify existence in such a cosmos, Pieper implies strongly, would be to wake up and work toward improving the lives of those in need, starting with the most desperate—to pull a Mother Teresa, in fact, although at the time Pieper was writing Mother Teresa had only just received her call and certainly wasn’t yet the well-known figure she later became. Even natural contemplation would seem baseless, to say nothing of the attempt to make supernatural contact with the Divine.
Yet in light of all that he has said elsewhere, we cannot really believe that Pieper believes in such a cosmos. While he tells us as much, he also tells us that he can compassionately understand how someone arrives at the despair that entails rejection of meaning. And when that rejection is total, he admits, “discussion is impossible.”
But if the rejection is negotiable, discussion becomes possible again. Could it be, Pieper asks, that when we turn away from the idea of happiness it is because we are aware that we do not deserve happiness? We are ashamed to accept joy as a gift. We know that we can never merit it. Yet this very knowledge of mercy-as-justice, Pieper says, has been “the motive force underlying the lives of quite a few saints.”
So we admit with Pieper that “the happiness of contemplation is not a comfortable happiness.” Its natural conditions are brittle, easily shattered. Its supernatural givenness is by no human means controllable. Pieper reminds us that St. Teresa of Avila believed a life of contemplation required more courage than one of martyrdom.
That might feel like an overstatement of the case. Yet when we think of the trouble people have to go through when they refuse to repeat mimetic formulae amounting to Caesar kyrios, it almost comes to seem it might be simpler and cleaner if they would make you a martyr by killing you quick, instead of dragging you alive through quicksand.*
Meanwhile, if anyone asks why anyone should spend their days in learning to see, and in sharing the fruits of those efforts, this is one reason why: Contemplation promotes courage. To quote Dostoyevsky, from the epigraph to Contemplative Realism: “Realists do not fear the results of their study.”
A robust vision of reality is anti-fragile. If the truth at the heart of things is a genuine truth, it does not require anyone’s anxious efforts at proof in order to remain true. We can see what we see as we see it, and speak of what is as it is.
*A ready example that comes to mind is the life and death of Franz Jägerstätter, gloriously told in Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life. Jägerstätter, for those who don’t know his story (https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/story-austrian-catholic-resister-franz-jagerstatter ), was imprisoned, beaten, and eventually killed by the Nazi regime for refusing to serve in the German army during WWII because of his religious convictions. He is considered a martyr and a Blessed by Catholics because his life stood to witness the same truth the original Christian martyrs died for: Caesar non est kyrios; Jesus kyrios est.**
**Real Latinists, help me out if this is a mess, but I’m sure the meaning registers.
To state what seems obvious today, but won’t necessarily be for future visitors: I’m posting this on Ash Wednesday, meaning Western Christians of varied traditions begin Lent today. (Our Eastern Rite brothers & sisters are way ahead of us.) If you feel so moved, I would love to hear how you’re observing Lent in the comments.