Chapter 1, “What is Contemplation?” Post 2

Merton begins his first chapter with a series of answers to the question “What is contemplation?” His first sentence dares to declare that “contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life.” Thereafter Merton can’t praise contemplation enough: it is “spiritual wonder,” “spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life,” “gratitude for life,” and awareness of the reality of “an invisible, transcendent, and infinitely abundant Source.” Contemplation sees “without seeing” and knows “without knowing,” “a knowledge too deep to be grasped in images, words or even in clear concepts” (1).

Contemplation is “beyond” (Merton uses the word eleven times in a single paragraph!) aesthetic intuition, art, poetry, philosophy, speculative theology, our own knowledge and light, beyond systems, explanations, discourse, dialogue, and our own self. It supercedes “every other form of intuition and experience—whether in art, in philosophy, in theology, in liturgy or in ordinary levels of love and of belief.” Although “compatible with all these things,” contemplation “is their highest fulfillment.” It reaches out “to the experience of the transcendent and inexpressible God”:

It knows God by seeming to touch Him. Or rather it knows Him as if it had been invisibly touched by Him . . . . [the ellipsis is Merton’s]. Touched by Him Who has no hands, but Who is pure Reality and the source of all that is real!

Here, in the first paragraphs of this chapter, Merton asserts that contemplation moves us beyond the boundaries of theology, traditional worship, and conventional prayer, the so-called cataphatic tradition by which we speak of and to God. Without disparaging all that we already "know" about God, contemplation--as God's gift!--places on the other side of sacred reading, Gospel proclamation, liturgical worship, and charismatic experience. Contemplation places in a sacred space that leaves behind all forms of piety, holy thoughtfulness, and idiosyncratic apprehension of God. In short, it places us within the apophatic tradition .

To be a contemplative is therefore a way of being superbly alive in God. While appreciating and complementing all that we associate with Sunday, Bible study, prayer groups, liturgy, and "institutionally church-produced" engendered relationships with God-- contemplation somehow manages something beyond. It is, as Merton says, "a more profound depth of faith." What that may mean is the burden and joy of New Seeds of Contemplation.

For more on cataphatic and apophatic understandings, visit Theologies: Theology for Normal People.

"You who are sitting in darkness, keep your hope alive; the rise of the morning star, the sun shall not be slow."