Dominicans, Contemplation & Veritas

For Dominicans, the Catholic traditions of contemplation and veritas have been guiding lights. Dominicans also have a tradition of taking leadership in emerging trends in the Church, as is evident in Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, Catherine of Siena, Marie-Joseph Lagrange, and Yves Congar. More recently, since the mid-1960's both the practice of contemplation and the meaning of veritas have undergone significant developments. So it is timely to consider these developments as they may affect the Dominican tradition.

Generally speaking, we have no universally accepted definitions of contemplation or veritas. But in the many historical accounts of what Christians meant by contemplation, we find two distinct contexts: contemplation as a state of life and contemplation as a method of prayer. As we will see, each context has significant implications for the Dominican heritage.

Contemplation as a state of life

Up to the 11th century, Christians envisioned two states of life: ordinary life in a family among neighbors or sectarian life in a community of spiritual purity. These were normally called active and contemplative, where contemplative meant not a method of prayer, but a life devoted to both prayer and study.

A third, “mixed life” of both action and contemplation, emerged in the 12th century with the Norbertines, and the Dominicans followed suit in the 13th. At the time, universities had established forums in which students and teachers would regularly address certain disputed questions about Christian beliefs. Among the countless questions raised, one asked which of the three states of life was most excellent. Aquinas proposed that the life of contemplation is more excellent than the active life because prayer and study more closely approach the heavenly Beatific Vision. But he set the mixed life even higher than the purely contemplative: “For even as it is better to enlighten than merely to shine, so is it better to give to others the fruits of one's contemplation than merely to contemplate.”¹

This is the source of the Dominican motto, “Contemplate, and share with others the fruit of our contemplation.”² Given the context, it is clear that Aquinas was speaking of contemplation not as a method of prayer but as a state of life. And since Aquinas envisioned the life of contemplation as both prayer and study, a practical directive for a Dominican-inspired life of contemplation in action might be expressed:

Pray and study to enlighten, not just to shine.

This directive has immediate implications for anyone dedicated to teaching or writing insofar as the impulse to shine affects one's countless choices of the very words and metaphors for communicating to others. The directive also has life-changing implications. The desire to be admired can pervade one's daydreams, the sorts of things one regrets, and one's entire self-world image. To achieve an abiding preference for enlightening over shining requires a conversion of horizon.

Contemplation in Methods of Prayer

In the Catholic tradition, we can find both contemplation and veritas as elements in at least five different methods of prayer. The two terms, in fact, are intimately connected because veritas, or truth, defines the object of contemplation. It is unlike meditation, whose object is generally acknowledged as ideas, meanings, and understanding. And it is unlike deliberation, whose object is values, the good, and the better. The object of contemplation is an acknowledgement, a realization, and a judgment about what is true about how things stand and what is truly better or worse.

1. Methodical Ascent

Prayer as a methodical ascent has roots in the 3rd century philosophy of Plotinus, who envisioned the universe as layered, from lower, material realities to the higher, more spiritual realities, with contemplation being the highest. Over the next three centuries, his vision deeply influenced the views on prayer of Augustine, Benedict, and Gregory the Great.³ Benedict in particular promoted among monks the practice of lectio divina, in which four interconnected modes of prayer were recognized:⁴ a lectio of reading or hearing Scripture; a meditatio on its meaning; an oratio that converses with God in light of this meditation, and a contemplatio that rests in the veritas—what is truly so and truly good—one has come to realize through the first three modes.

In the contemplative mode, one attends in wordless awe to what is quite beyond human understanding. This has an ancient heritage: “Be still and know that I am God” (Ps 46:10). “No one shall see my face and live” (Ex 33:20). But what understanding cannot attain, love can. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing (14th cent.) wrote of an “unknowing” way to God: “By love he may be gotten and holden; by thought never.”⁵

In this sort of prayer, contemplation is generally regarded as a human attainment that follows a method. But here it is important to distinguish this from mystical experience, which is regarded as completely received, often unexpectedly.⁶ Teresa of Avila (d.1582) describes this experience well:

When picturing Christ . . . and sometimes even when reading, I used unexpectedly to experience a consciousness of the presence of God of such a kind that I could not possibly doubt that he was within me or that I was wholly engulfed in him. This is in no sense a vision: I believe that it is called mystical theology.⁷

Augustine, Aquinas, and many Dominican writers regarded mystical experience not something one reaches through ascetical practices but something purely God-given.⁸ The experience is typically an intense but fleeting sense of divine illumination and engulfment. This aligns with biblical accounts of extraordinary visitations from God: they are presented as divine testimonies that God entrusts a mission to an individual, not as an ideal to pursue in prayer.

No doubt, Dominic was familiar with a contemplative mode of prayer and of mystical experience. But because his first priority for his communities was preaching, for which study was necessary, he was indifferent to methods and levels of prayer and even skeptical of long periods of prayer and the idea of a state of perfection.⁹ His practice likely influenced Aquinas’ assertion that a life of contemplation and action is more excellent than a life of contemplation alone.

2. Finding God in All Things

In what may seem contrary to methodical ascent, contemplation has also been considered as a way to find God in all things ordinary. The classical source for this is found in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola (d. 1556). In his “Contemplation to Attain Love,”¹⁰ one begins with a short meditation on two principles: that love should show itself in deeds rather than in words and that lovers give and share what they have. The exercise then moves to contemplations that find God in all things:

I will ponder with great affection how much God our Lord has done for me, how much He has given me of what he possesses, and finally how much, as far as he can, the same Lord desires to give Himself to me according to his divine decrees.

Notice: as far as he can, the same Lord desires to give Himself to me. Those who contemplate this truth cannot help but be humbled, awestruck and wordless. Although many Christians favor an agnostic uncertainty about just how much God loves the world, let alone themselves, the conviction of as far as God can is evident also in the New Testament metaphor for the most total act of self-giving imaginable: “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son” (Jn 3:16).¹¹

Additional contemplations find God dwelling in all creation, giving existence to material elements, life to plants, sensation to animals, and intelligence to humans. Further contemplations find God dwelling in myself, giving me existence, life, sensation, and intelligence, plus making me a temple, created in the divine image and likeness. In all these, “I will consider how God works and labors for me in every created thing. That is, he conducts himself as one who labors.” At the end of these contemplations Ignatius returns to the principles that love shows itself in deeds and that lovers share all they have: “I will . . . consider, according to all reason and justice, what I ought to offer the Divine Majesty, that is, all I possess and myself with it.”

Notice the contrast: The monastic tradition of lectio divina envisions a prayer that moves from reading, to meditation, to affective conversation, and ending at contemplation. The approach of finding God in all things envisions a prayer that moves from meditation on the nature of love, directly into a contemplation of God's presence in all things, and ending at a deliberation of what one ought to do for God. Yet neither tradition has claimed superiority over the other. And both traditions present the methods not as steps to follow rigorously but partly as introductions for beginners and partly as helps for the more advanced to understand the flow of the spiritual movements they actually experience.

3. God's Goodness

The Christian tradition of contemplating God's goodness is remarkably different from the Muslim and Israelite traditions. All three use the symbol of God giving the divine Word, but with quite different meanings. Muslims see God's Word as contained in a book—the Quran, dictated by an angel of God, which sets the foundations of the universal religion of Islam. Israelites see God's Word creating not only all of heaven and earth, not only all humanity, but also all the many statutes and laws of Israel—to be a light for the peoples, a lamp for the nations.¹² Christians see God's Word as both a person in history and a love in hearts.¹³ The Word comes in Jesus of Nazareth, who, being filled with God's love, announces the good news that God's Kingdom has been launched on earth and will be fulfilled in heaven.¹⁴ The Word comes also as the same love within individual hearts: a Spirit of being in love with God; a Spirit of joy and peace; a Spirit that overflows in being kind, good, trustful, gentle, and self-controlled;¹⁵ a Spirit of Truth who speaks on our behalf and prays in us when we cannot find words of our own.¹⁶

In the Christian tradition, the uncanny completeness of God's goodness is revealed as a total self-gift to humanity. It is a double gift—God's true and inner Word¹⁷ given to human history and God's true and inner Spirit of Love flooding human hearts. That is, in the Nazarene and in the personal wellsprings of one's love, God truly enters the created world. It is on account of this realization that Christians recognized a double movement within the very essence of God. Contemplation of this truth is the basis for all subsequent doctrine about God as a Trinity: a Source, a Word, and a Spirit.¹⁸ Efforts to understand the Trinity that overlook what Christians held as true about God's goodness typically get lost in a thicket of concepts.

Contemplation of this veritas is simple yet elusive. It is simple in the sense that a welcome of the desires and vision of Jesus the Nazarene and of one's own being in love is in truth a personal welcome of God's self-gift to the world. It is also elusive because it is not a pattern of certain events that easily catches our attention but rather a reality in all events. To grasp the totality of God's self-gift to all history and in all hearts is not like a fish noticing water; it is a grasp of something true.

4. The Life of Christ

No doubt, Christian contemplations of the life of Christ began with his first followers. New Testament writers then aimed to announce good news, something hidden and now revealed, something made manifest in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and in God's self-gift in the Holy Spirit. This required of Jesus’ followers not only meditative explorations of the meaning of what they saw and heard but also calm contemplations of the truth of the divine-human drama. It is quite likely that believers reading the Bible in every generation thereafter have done the same without distinguishing between meditation and contemplation or consciously following any particular method of contemplation.¹⁹

Yet in the Middle Ages one method of contemplation stands out by its overt reliance on imagination and bodily sensations. It turns upside-down any assumptions that God is attained only by rising beyond the material world.²⁰ In his Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius Loyola presents 56 “contemplations” of the life of Christ drawn from biblical accounts. In these contemplations, one is to “be present to the words and deeds recorded as if you hear with your ears and see with your eyes”²¹ and to enter into conversation with the persons as friend to friend.²² The overall effort is not to deepen one's understanding but to become company with Christ in his desires and even his agonies as he brings God's Kingdom to where he is. This is why, among the 56 biblical passages, Ignatius includes only one teaching (Sermon on the Mount) and only five miracles. In 40 passages, one contemplates simply walking and talking with Jesus in an actual event. Again, just as in his “Contemplation to Attain Love,” Ignatius moves from contemplation of actual events to a deliberation that here proposes to “act against all carnal and worldly love” and to commit oneself “entirely for the work” of Christ the King.²³

5. How God Contemplates the World

In our own day, biblical studies have been revolutionized by a hermeneutics that asks what biblical authors and the persons they wrote about actually meant. Gerhard Lohfink²⁴ recently proposed that what Jesus meant to do was what the Father is doing, namely, choosing Israel to be a people who trust totally in God and to be a light of hope to the world. Jesus contemplated the world with the eyes and heart of the Father, and his first disciples probably did the same. However, in many ways during the following centuries, Christians drifted away from contemplating the world as God contemplates it and toward contemplating themselves individually as sinners and God as one who comes to them chiefly through the sacraments of the Church. Historians make scant mention of contemplations of the world as God contemplates it. Still, because the gospels invited readers of every generation to follow Christ, it is likely that many Christians did turn their eyes with Christ to where God's gaze is fixed.²⁵

Providentially, the priority of a contemplation that sees the world with God's eyes was officially reinstated by the bishops at Vatican II (1965). Their Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes)²⁶ begins:

The joys and hopes, the grief and anguish of the people of our time,

especially those who are poor or afflicted,

are the joys and hopes,

the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ as well.

Nothing that is genuinely human fails to find an echo in their hearts.

For theirs is a community of people united in Christ

and guided by the Holy Spirit,

in their pilgrimage toward the Father's Kingdom,

bearers of a message of salvation for all humanity.

The object of this contemplation is not simply God's greatness, nor God as present in all things, nor God's goodness, nor God's Word, nor God as Father, Son, and Spirit, nor Jesus in biblical settings. It is the entire world-drama of salvation one contemplates with God, at God's side, as it were.

The phenomenon of a world-drama dominating one's imagination is not unusual,²⁷ but only recently have philosophers turned their attention to the symbols by which a culture understands itself. Martin Heidegger (d. 1976) spoke of our befindlichkeit in which we all imagine ourselves situated in a sort of drama.²⁸ The historian-philosopher Eric Voegelin (d. 1985) identified three predominant dramas about the human condition which appeared in cultures struggling with how to envision the human quest for transcendence. Despite the fact that these dramas are symbolic expressions, they were considered true, in the sense that Plato referred to his Parable of the Cave as a “true story.”²⁹

• • A cosmological truth envisions the human condition as dominated by the cosmos, the stars, the empire, or various ideas about fate and an ultimate irony of life. This is predominant in the early empires out of which the Roman Empire arose.

• • An anthropological truth envisions the human condition, with all its wars and hatred, as the struggle to transcend itself by means of reason and virtue. This is predominant in the works of Plato and Aristotle.

• • A soteriological (saving) truth envisions the human condition as being approached and saved by God in friendship—a God who is partial toward the poor and oppressed. This is predominant in the Gospel of Christianity.

Clearly, Gaudum et Spes presents a saving truth. Those who contemplate the veritas of this drama may well wonder whether they have been living by some other, less saving, world-drama. Even among Christians we find some whose world-drama is the cosmological drama in which everything is governed by the stars or the government or just dumb luck, good and bad. For others, it is an anthropological drama of humanity struggling with clouded reason and feeble virtue while God rests in an eternal Sabbath, high above, almighty, all-providing, all-forgiving, and all but friendly. Now, however, the Christian tradition has recovered the contemplation of God coming down in friendship, always laboring³⁰ in both the living tradition of Jesus Founder³¹ and in the living Spirit of Love in human hearts.

How does this relate to the Dominican tradition? We might recall how Aquinas’ extraordinary work shifted the philosophical framework of theology from Plotinus to Aristotle. It seems fitting, then, that today, with the same readiness, Dominicans can incorporate a philosophy that recognizes the truth about salvation expressed in the symbol of a world-drama. Just as the Dominican watchword veritas originally stood for preaching truth as opposed to heresy, today veritas may also stand for the Dominican vocation to preach the true story of how God contemplates the world and now labors in our history and hearts.

The Inheritance

How might one capitalize on the inheritance of this tradition of contemplation and veritas?

One way is to maintain the connection between study and prayer. Prayer without study has no anchor in the truth about how stands the world; it easily drifts into the marsh of personal fantasy. Study without prayer, in believers at least, is evidence of an inner conflict between incompatible world-dramas: One imagines the work of study within the anthropological drama of human self-sufficiency based on reason and virtue while imagining prayer within the soteriological drama of human insufficiency and God's saving work. The natural dynamic of a person's consciousness, especially a person in love with God, is restless to resolve this conflict and envision the world with God's eyes and heart.

Another way to is to develop the habit of noticing exactly where to direct our attention in contemplative prayer. Negatively, this requires that I abstain awhile from the urges to understand or to plan for action. Positively, contemplation can focus in several ways. I may dwell in a mutuality of friendship where the Creator and I are each a “you” to one another. I may abide in the Gospel veritas of what my life and the world drama are really all about. And I may tremble in awe over what has yet to be—for no eye has seen, no ear has heard, nor any heart imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him (1 Cor 2:9).