What is contemplation? To be sure, the ordinary use and everyday understanding of the term would suggest that here there is no real mystery to ponder. For as Kevin Hart observes in Contemplation: The Movements of the Soul, “These days we are likely to think of contemplation as the lowest of cognitive modes, as a free-floating state close to daydreaming” (CP 44). Inasmuch as contemplation does not offer the kind of “intellectual security” (CP 44) that natural scientific and mathematical analysis makes available to us, today our ordinary language reflects the modern deflation that the classical and medieval understanding of the term has undergone since the seventeenth century, it now having come banally to signify little more than, as Gertrude Stein, for one, put it, “mulling over a situation” (LL 162).
Hart’s two complementary studies on contemplation (in addition to Contemplation, a sleek introductory volume intended for lay readers and students, there is also the scholarly monograph Lands of Likeness: For A Poetics of Contemplation, just cited) do not only examine the term’s linguistic flesh, but the phenomenon itself lying coiled at the heart of the term’s semantic history. One of Hart’s central aims in formulating, then, what he in turn calls “a hermeneutics of contemplation” (LL 13) is to till the modern soil onto which contemplation has been transplanted, with an eye to unearthing its deeper and expansive poetic, aesthetic, philosophical, spiritual, and indeed theological roots, a revitalizing task which, once having examined and thereby restored the diminished modern sense of the phenomenon to “its fullest semantic range” (CP 3), reveals that contemplation is “free and adventurous; it is pleasurable; and it accomplishes a valuable work in bringing [us] closer to God” (CP 44).
Hart’s desire to consider seriously, and have us consider along with him, contemplation’s original religious home (while along the way always doing justice to the various secular manifestations it has taken, especially in Romantic and post-Romantic poetry and post-Kantian philosophy) is sure to startle those who are wholly accustomed to the secularized understanding of it, and the belief that such an understanding is deserving of the last word. For those who feel that way, when contemplation’s spiritual origins are acknowledged at all, it is usually solely within the context of Eastern spiritualities and their recent appropriation in trendy “self-care” and “self-therapy” practices, such as popular stoicism, “mindfulness,” and yoga. As Hart notes, many today are therefore unaware of the rich history of Christian contemplation.
While there are important similarities, the differences between Buddhism, Hinduism, and Daoism, on the one hand, and Christianity, on the other, ought not be understated. Whereas in the Eastern religions for which contemplation is an exercise in freeing us of “anger, fear, jealousy, and other defilements” (CP 5), in Christian contemplation, which is Hart’s stated main focus, the goal is not merely to “come to collect oneself and understand the world without illusion” (CP 5), but to become “more and more like Christ,” which is to say, to “attain union with the deity” (CP 4-5). This simplification of heart and mind is a practice of drawing closer to God, of ushering us, however incompletely in this life, into the “lands of likeness,” as Achard of St. Victor’s expression from which Hart borrows for one of his work’s titles expresses it. “To raise the mind to God,” as Hart says, “is to take one’s first steps into the lands of likeness in the hope that one will increasingly become more like Christ” (LL 43).
As just the foregoing preliminary sketch of the phenomenon will have already made clear, the initial question concerning what contemplation is leads immediately to others: What particular truth, if any, is its designated object or ultimate aim? What does it give to be beheld? What contribution does it make to the rest of the life of the one who practices it? And finally, more generally, what does the fact that we are capable of living contemplatively disclose about the human condition? Or, as Hart himself would formulate that question, what is it to be made in the imago Dei? Such are just some of the many fundamental questions at issue in Lands of Likeness and Contemplation, and although it is not possible to say everything that they give to think, even a relatively brief discussion can suffice to show why readers thirsty for spiritual refreshment amid the desert landscape of today’s modern, nihilistic, technological world will find an oasis of meaning in Hart’s reflections on contemplation.
Hart’s point of departure is the Roman templum, the religious site in which the gods were thought to reveal the future by the flight of birds. Taking it as a metaphor for the locus of aesthetic experience, Hart likens the page of the poem itself to a templum, the space on the page being a place of disclosure whereby ideas and feelings pass, “some that are readily identified, and others that call for further meditation, before which we hold ourselves, anticipating something that will make us not more than human but perhaps a more reflective human” (LL 64). Here Hart turns to the twelfth-century theologian Richard of St. Victor, who compares the movements of the soul with the movements of birds in the skies (LL 39). According to Richard, contemplation involves the soul’s ascent. As Hart explains it, “For ascent can also bespeak what happens when we proceed from regarding the world as nature to coming to reflect on it as creation, that is, from the world as given to us through the lenses of natural science to the world as given to us in terms of divine power” (LL 24).
Many contemporary readers will immediately associate this aspect of Richard’s conception of contemplation with natural theology. And Hart, for his own part, welcomes that connection, although he is very insistent that the sort of aesthetic and religious contemplation he ultimately has in view is not a matter of offering philosophical or theological proofs for God’s existence. When, then, Hart clarifies that contemplation of God “can occur in and through nature and in and through his kingdom” (LL 87), and invokes the famous words of St. Paul in Romans, he does so, not with an eye to suggesting that here the task is one of proving God’s existence by way of deductive argument, but rather of attuning us to God’s presence. In short, Hart is not attempting to demonstrate God’s existence through nature, but rather to clarify what it is to live contemplatively before God. (In this respect, Hart interprets this “expansive” form of natural theology just as his fellow phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion has interpreted Romans 1 in Revelation Comes from Elsewhere.)
Part of what makes the manner of contemplative experience to which Hart is attempting to draw our attention an “expansive” form of natural theology (what he elsewhere terms a form of “spacious reading” [LL 324]), is that when reading a poem in this fashion, “the aesthetic, affective, axiological, naturalistic, theoretical, and phenomenological attitudes adopted [are] adopted as they are in life” (LL 87). So, although Hart notes that for Thomas Aquinas “the contemplative life consists only in beholding God, not also in the consideration of any truth whatsoever” (LL 26), Hart himself will ultimately follow the alternative path set by Richard, for whom “anything and everything can be contemplated” (LL 87). (As examples of contemplation’s endless litany of potential items of attention, Hart recounts Richard’s successive meditative stages involved in contemplating ordinary things like a leaf or a daffodil.) Richard’s theory of contemplation, in turn, will lend itself to understanding how contemplation can be a practice with the arts, including modern poetry.
However, before considering the nature of contemplative modern poetry, Hart first turns his attention to philosophical contemplation. It is Schopenhauer, Coleridge, and Husserl, he says, who most clearly employ a kind of “philosophical, not religious” (CP 7) contemplation. As Hart observes, although contemplation has always had a religious significance, the fact that it “enters Latin by way of Cicero perhaps guarantees sufficient awareness of its philosophical birthrights” (LL 18). And, of course, there is Aristotle, for whom, as Hart writes, “philosophers are the most happy of mortals because, like the gods, they can reflect on the highest things that can be known” (CP 8).
It is first with Kant, however, says Hart, that “contemplation is loosened from God as its natural or inevitable object” (CP 100), precisely because it is in Kant’s notion of “aesthetic contemplation” that “the adjective changes the meaning of the noun” (CP 101). What we have with modern figures like Schopenhauer, Coleridge, and Husserl, thus, is a post-Kantian response to the same question that formerly had divided Richard and Aquinas. For, Schopenhauer, Coleridge, and Husserl all hold, in their own ways, that any truth whatsoever, and not only truth limited to God alone, can be contemplated. Hart writes,
Schopenhauer, Coleridge, and Husserl all center their writing on the word idea, although each has his own sense of it. In a way, each proposes the idea as the Sabbath of contemplation. For Schopenhauer, one is freed momentarily from the cycle of desire and frustration; for Coleridge, one is raised to the level where one can think of God; and, for Husserl, one can begin to understand the essence of things (LL 86).
Through a philosophical contemplation whereby “one enters a spiritual space” (CP 48), philosophy itself, at least with Husserl or even Ludwig Wittgenstein, becomes a mode of contemplation (CP 9). By interrupting our usual habits of cognition to “reveal reality more broadly or more intensely” (CP 9-10), one encounters “the world in its pristine strangeness” (CP 10). For Husserl, in particular, philosophical contemplation, or philosophy as contemplation, involves becoming a “‘disinterested spectator’” (LL 70) reflecting on the “universal structures of experience” (LL 72). Needless to say, though this form of contemplation involves a “neutralization” of our natural attitude to the world and hence an interruption of what Heidegger would call our typical “absorption” in the world, it still is a far cry from Christian meditation or contemplation.
In Husserl, “God,” as Hart says, “transcends phenomenological inquiry,” and so remains “of this world only” (LL 86). (For what it’s worth, it should be observed that Husserl’s views about the place of God in phenomenological inquiry are not so straightforward. The standard Anglophone reading, based on §58 of Ideas I, that has understood Husserl as a methodological atheist is open to doubt, as Emmanuel Housset’s Husserl et l’idée de Dieu has shown. Hart’s own analysis of Husserl does gesture in this direction when, on more than one occasion in both Contemplation and Lands of Likeness, he highlights the importance of Husserl’s limit and generative phenomenology to Husserl’s overall philosophical enterprise.)
What especially interests Hart about Husserl, however, is that the latter’s phenomenological attitude, which through the epoché “brackets” the world in order to subject the world and its things to eidetic variations providing an intuition of their essences, bears striking similarities to the aesthetic attitude adopted when reading fiction, or exercising the imagination in other aesthetic contexts. This is the Husserl who intrigues Hart, the one who “opens a way to contemplate being, including the characters and situations we imagine or read about in poems” (LL 79). Be that as it may, Husserl’s philosophical contemplation does not aim to reach God, not in the sense Hart is interested in highlighting anyway.
For in the contemplation that will ultimately interest Hart, “one learns to adopt another attitude” (CP 48), one which, rather than taking up a landscape, or music, or even a poem, trains its focus on God, a “Kingdom attitude,” whereby “one accepts what Jesus called the Kingdom of God and begins to seek it” (CP 48). Such an attitude is something beyond what Schopenhauer, Coleridge, or Husserl offer. Instead of merely opening oneself to new ways of engaging with the world, and considering it from new horizons, it is instead a matter of ascending beyond the world to be before God.
Along with the broadening of modern philosophical contemplation, there of course is a similar broadening with the practice of aesthetic contemplation in poetry. In the past, aesthetic attention had been likened to the ascent of birds. The pervasive association of contemplation and birds is evident in St. Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, as Hart notes. And there was also Hugh of Fouilly for whom, as Hart writes, contemplation was a practice whereby one can “put on the wings of contemplation by which [one] may fly to heaven” (LL 95). And although Bernard of Clairvaux is not known for having a deep appreciation of the world’s natural beauty, as Hart writes, “he had no hesitation in figuring consideratio as bird flight” (LL 93).
Yet it is the poet G. M. Hopkins who inevitably comes to mind as the sole modern poet of Christian contemplation as spiritual flight. In 1873 or 1874, as Hart notes, Hopkins writes, “Poetry is speech framed for contemplation of the mind by the way of hearing or . . . speech framed to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and above its interest in meaning” (LL 97). In “The Windhover” (1877), Hopkins contemplates the kestrel, seeing the bird as a figure of the soul’s spiritual ascent to Christ. Hopkins’s famous notion of the world’s “inscape,” thus, comes into view through a form of aesthetic attention to nature that orients the poet’s sense of contemplation.
Hopkins, however, is the notable modern exception. For the other great modern poets, aesthetic contemplation does not take flight to God. With Gustave Roud, for instance, contemplation of a Swiss landscape never opens unto the Creator. And with John Ashbery, aesthetic contemplation does not lead to God through reflection in and through nature, but rather remains fixed on the material dimension of language, “another logos” that ultimately gives to think death alone as life’s final horizon. As Hart observes, for those who engage in this form of aesthetic contemplation, there is no satisfaction in life, “even though they may well appear to be calm and reflective” (LL 40). In the wake of the Enlightenment’s removal of the deity from contemplative practice, whether aesthetic or philosophical, the secular counterpart to Christian contemplation emerges, which, broadened but diminished, renders possible the beholding of an idea, a problem, a landscape, another human being, an artwork, or anything at all (LL 43)—anything at all, that is, but God.
The abandonment of God in modern aesthetic contemplation is a line that continues through Wordsworth, Emerson, and Rimbaud, and it is the subject of Hart’s searching attention, with particular reference to Wallace Stevens, A. R. Ammons, and Philip Larkin. With Wordsworth, as Hart writes, poetic contemplation “passed from suspension before the deity to the poet pondering his own subjectivity” (LL 6). Whereas Augustine tells us that he found himself “‘in a region of unlikeness,’ that is, far from God” (LL 5) before beginning to make his ascent to God, Stevens offers us no such transcendence. With Stevens, we are called to observe and behold mortal being only. Stevens formulates a poetics that is “virtually religious” inasmuch as it deploys imagination in a compensatory role that had previously been filled by God. We pass, in a word, from a Supreme Being to the quest for the Supreme Fiction. The poet strives to perceive reality “without embellishment” (LL 199), an imaginative exercise ultimately frustrated insofar as this other “mode of ineffability” does not open to the God of apophatic theology, but rather the world’s muteness, and hence in turn man’s destitute condition that “makes no sense” (LL 201).
Where previously, then, birds and bees were associated with religious contemplation, as an occasion to ascend to a spiritual reality lying above and beyond the visible natural world, now aesthetic contemplation of language and the natural world have nowhere to ascend. As Hart explains, “there is no redemptive Logos, only language” (LL 209). Rather than the birds of the sky appearing in a natural templum that directs our attention to heaven, there is nothing before our gaze besides the banal repetition of daily life. Hence Stevens’s cry of woe, “To find the real, / To be stripped of every fiction except one, / The fiction of an absolute—” (LL 220). Here the quest to encounter reality unencumbered by any human interpretation leads not only to the failure to achieve naked contact with what truly is, it finds itself mired in a land of unlikeness, cut off from God.
It is the American poet A. R. Ammons, however, who most fully imbibes the materialistic, naturalistic sense that the notion of an absolute, unconditioned reality is itself a fiction. Here the deflation of natural theology is complete, for even Schopenhauer or Nietzsche’s notion that high art might replace the consolations of religion and philosophy is abandoned as a fiction. As Hart writes, Ammons’s thoroughly natural contemplation is such that “the templum has shrunk from the sky, metaphor of the divine realm, to the poet’s consciousness” (LL 227). With the rise of the modern scientific method, mystery for Ammons is “no more than that something cannot be explained at the moment” (LL 232). While natural beauty may fill us with awe, the poem that responds to nature cannot satisfy what Ammons himself admits is man’s ontological state of longing. Hence, for the stream of modern poetry that runs from Emerson to Ammons by way of Stevens, poetic contemplation does afford peak aesthetic experience, yet reflection on nature’s mathematical and physical elements leads nowhere. Poems, like walks, have no final ends, which leads Ammons to characterize a poem’s meaning as emblematic of human life itself: “‘on course but destinationless’” (LL 249).
In “Corsons Inlet,” for instance, he likens the experience of reading a poem to the experience of walking along the Jersey Shore bluffs. Despite whatever beauties and delights that come our way during such meanderings, without spiritual ascent, there is no final end to the excursion. This sense of inescapable forlornness in Stevens and Ammons is all the more acute in the poetry of Larkin. For Larkin, it is death that enjoys the last word on human existence. In “Aubade,” he writes,
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true (LL 148).
The modern preoccupation with death leads Hart to a discussion of the phenomenon of fascination more generally. Many of the modern technological devices that occupy so much of our time and attention prove to be diversions from our mortality and felt sense of meaninglessness. Hart consequently anticipates and responds to an objection to Christian contemplation, according to which contemplative practice is said to be a waste of time. As Hart notes, much of our time already is filled “with watching TV, playing video games, surfing the Internet, gossiping, checking apps on an iPhone” (CP 120).
If those who sometimes meditate or contemplate are accused of self-indulgence, surely then they are no more wasting their time in doing so than those who choose to spend their time engaged in the kind of activities that typically dominate our day. Contemplation, in fact, is perhaps the most effective means to free ourselves from the grips of fascination, from the hall of black screen mirrors. If we all know the familiar feeling of “prolonged emptiness” (CP 129) that accompanies our being unable to release ourselves from looking at our screens, it is contemplation that can free us.
In keeping with the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” here of course someone might object to Hart that the sort of individual, spiritual contemplative practice he recommends as a response to our nihilistic, technological age is insufficiently political. It is an old objection, dating back, in its own way, to the accusation of “quietism” against the Christian mystics of the early modern period. As Hart acknowledges, one might contend that “action, not contemplation, is called for, whether it be taking to the streets, revaluing values, or driving to an appointment with one’s analyst” (LL 125-26). With an eye, then, to answering the most common criticisms of contemplation, namely, that it is a waste of life, unnatural, leads one into heresy, and drains the resources of those who support it (CP 116), Hart turns his attention to an examination of Geoffrey Hill’s poem on the life and death of Charles Péguy.
Political and revolutionary zeal, Hart claims, threaten to collapse into mere politique, eliminating any sense of mystery, lest the one who engages in the pressing political and social circumstances of one’s day does so with a spiritually principled commitment to God. Péguy himself, an embodiment of the “radical soul,” exemplifies what is best about the one fully committed to taking ethical action, and yet in a way that never loses sight of the reality that the political is not the realm of salvation. Here Hart makes a similar observation about modern poetry’s purported redemptive power. Poetry, as he says, “can testify to dark events or be made to point to them, [but] it cannot redeem us” (CP 8-9). It can be beautiful, consoling, or even edifying, but the love of reading a poem is always one-sided. For a poem cannot love us.
What much of modern criticism has failed to admit honestly, then, is that, without an ascent beyond the world to God, the modern poem, in this respect itself a “profile of modernity” (LL 157), cannot free itself from fascination, whether that be with the political or above all death. Secular aesthetic contemplation, however otherwise beautiful or consoling, in the last analysis, remains a poetics of despair. That the modern aesthetic contemplation of atheist poetry should in the end promise little more than resignation to a “bleak world” is a reality rooted in human nature, in the fact that poets such as Ammons and Larkin fail to understand our condition in light of the imago Dei. In this respect, Hart’s hermeneutics of contemplation serves as a reminder that it is always possible to awaken from our modern dogmatic atheistic slumber—the “death of the death of God” can be accomplished by anyone who responds to God’s call of love. What follows in the wake of answering that call is the further realization that the task of our mortal lives is neither to interpret nor to change the world, but to overcome it, something possible only through faith, and, for those who feel called to it, Christian contemplation.
Just then as Heidegger’s existential analytic presupposes that the reader of Being and Time is ontologically fit to follow its analyses insofar as the question of being the work raises explicitly as a question is always already at work in the reader’s own life prior to any philosophical reflection on it, so Hart’s own hermeneutics of contemplation contends that the reader is able to follow its analyses of the ascent to God insofar as each of us is made in the imago Dei. The desire for God (what Ammons had in his own confused way expressed as a “longing”) ensures that even amid the modern, technological world’s “region of unlikeness,” spiritual ascent to God remains possible. Hart, thus, accordingly speaks in passing of “the eternal breaking into the temporal” (LL 282). It is impossible not to hear this expression as a deliberate allusion to Kierkegaard. Surprisingly, Kierkegaard is someone never mentioned in Lands of Likeness directly.
The omission is notable, to say the least, and it cannot be accidental, for Hart knows that readers are bound to think of Kierkegaard’s famous edifying discourses on the birds when considering his hermeneutics of contemplation, which itself takes bird flight for its guiding metaphor for the soul’s contemplative ascent to God. For Kierkegaard, contemplating the birds of the air is an exercise in what Hart himself calls “expansive” natural theology, for it is in reflection on the birds that we are served a reminder of our own spiritual vocation amid Creation. Furthermore, there is the fact that Kierkegaard’s “three spheres of existence” are in important ways shaped in light of each life stage’s way of coordinating religion, philosophy, and poetry. One might suspect that Hart’s omission of Kierkegaard could simply have been due to considerations of space, but it is quite possible that there is something more deliberate in the choice, an “indirect” communication in the gesture, as it were. In any case, those who are left wondering what exactly Hart’s thoughts are concerning Kierkegaard’s potential contribution to a hermeneutics of contemplation will be pleased to know that Hart is currently writing a book about Kierkegaard and phenomenology that will no doubt shed light on that question.
In characteristic modesty, Hart cautions his reader at the conclusion of Lands of Likeness that it is not a book that explicitly “broached the idea of reading poems in order to draw close to God” (LL 324). By work’s end, however, it is quite plain that reading poems would be capable of aiding us in doing so. As for Contemplation, Hart at the outset again cautions that it is not a work meant as “a guide that tells [us] how to contemplate God” (CP 1). And yet, trite as it may sound to say, Hart’s reflections on Christian contemplation provoke the very movements of soul they invoke. In reading them, the soul takes flight from the lands of unlikeness.
