This early rehearsal of the term’s valences won’t necessarily hit its mark, unless we first expand both terms—“contemplation” and “realism”—or, rather, stretch our sense of what they intend to say. If the sound of the bow scrapes a bit, or the unfinished costume’s fabric feels starchy, scratchy, that’s all right. Work in progress can look a mess.
So: Contemplative realism is an approach to artistic practice with an ambitious goal. It seeks nothing less than to revive and refresh the human capacity for intellectual and spiritual vision. Yet contemplative realism is not merely a practice of art. It encompasses a habit of vision, which precedes any practice of art. Contemplative realism, as a habit of vision, seeks to internalize all knowable truth so that that truth continually shines through and can be received in its fullness.
The goal of contemplative realism, as a practice of art, is to make works that are both technically proficient or perfect—works that, as works of art, do exactly what it is they were made to do—works that raise their viewer’s gaze beyond themselves to that dimension of human experience that art can only suggest, never fully express.
Rather than being—as O’Connor famously put it—the pair of “spectacles” by which the artist sees, in contemplative realism the vision becomes authentically the artist’s own, without need of other corrective. As such, contemplative realism recognizes, as O’Connor following Guardini also did, that vision is rooted in the heart and that, as such, certain things are visible only to the eyes of the heart. It is these eyes, as much as those of the body, that need their vision checked.
In the context of fiction, where it was first developed, contemplative realism combines technical advances gained by the literary realist tradition in the last 150 years with spiritual illuminations from the wisdom of saints and scholars to craft a more expansive vision of the human soul living in its present embodied context.
Contemplative realist fiction draws attention to both the horizontal (natural) and vertical (supernatural) aspects of human experience. It countenances both mystery and ambiguity but acknowledges the innate elevation of mystery over ambiguity. It holds out hope for the possibility of redemption while never forgetting the cost of grace.