“The Most Perfect Expression of Being Alive”

On rediscovering contemplation

This is the third article in a series about the meaning of life (we don’t shy away from the big questions here at Via Mediaevalis…). The preceding articles are listed below.

1. “You Are Here to Look at the Stars”: Ancient Life, Modern Life, and the Crisis of Meaning

2. The Meaning of Life, and the Closing of Doors

Today’s post will continue this series and also clarify its special relevance to “current events,” by which I mean the approach of the liturgical season and sacred fast of Lent.

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“Except the blind forces of Nature,” said the British historian Sir Henry Maine, “nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin.” Maine’s exaggeration aside, it is almost dizzying to consider how much of Western culture derives directly or indirectly from

The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace.

Thus Lord Byron, England’s famed Romantic poet whose troubled life ended prematurely in that very country which he praised. He went there hoping to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, but instead died of fever.

Western Europe during the Middle Ages was by no means devoid of ancient Greek influence. Though the Greek language was not studied, and though Greek religion felt increasingly foreign, Christianized Rome was the cultural lifeblood of the medieval West, and we must remember that the Roman alphabet was inherited from the Greeks; that Roman literature developed from Greek models; that Roman philosophy descended from Greek philosophy; that Roman architecture depended upon Greek prototypes; that Roman artists adopted the techniques of Greek artists; and that the New Testament scriptures of Roman Catholicism were written entirely in the Greek language.

As John Senior observed, even the Greek word for “human being”—just the word itself!—can tell us something fundamental about our nature, our purpose, and our destiny: anthropos is

a combination of ana, meaning “upward,” and tropos, meaning “turn”; man is the upward-turning animal who walks erect, whose head is fixed in such a way that he can see the sun and stars.

A man named Anaxagoras lived in Athens during the fifth century BC. He belonged to the group known as the Presocratic philosophers—in other words, he was one of the first philosophers in the history of civilization. Diogenes Laërtius, writing much later, relates that a man once asked Anaxagoras a most important question: “For what end have you been born?” In other words, “Why are you alive? What is the meaning of your life?” You would be hard-pressed to find a single person in modern industrialized society who would answer as Anaxagoras did: “To contemplate the sun, and the moon, and the heavens.”

The action to which Anaxagoras refers is conveyed by the Greek word θεωρία (theoria).¹ The Romans translated theoria as contemplatio, a word suggesting “to look at” or “to study, to consider,” and the equivalent Latinate terminology has generally been employed by English and French translators. Though I love the word “contemplation,” it gives an imperfect idea of theoria: “contemplation” in modern English is often a primarily intellectual or reflective activity, whereas Greek theoria is defined first as viewing or beholding, and secondarily as mental consideration. Even in the Middle Ages, after the Old French contemplacion had filtered into Middle English, there was a tendency to spiritualize or intellectualize the word’s meaning. The Ancrene Wisse, a rule written for medieval anchoresses, explains that

the niht-fuhel flith bi niht ant biyet i theosternesse his fode. Alswa schal ancre fleon with contemplatiun – thet is, with heh thoht, ant with hali bonen bi niht toward heovene - ant biyeote bi niht hire sawle fode.

(as the night-fowl flies by night and gets its food in darkness, so shall the hermit fly with contemplation—that is, with high thoughts and holy prayers—by night toward heaven, and obtain, by night, food for her soul.)

In another example, the author of the Reule of Crysten Religioun, a mid-fifteenth-century text, states that “contemplation is not else to say than consideration or speculation in the reason.” However, we have here traces of the original sense, because English “speculation” was at this time closer to its Latin root, the verb speculari: to watch, observe, explore.

Interestingly, that ancestral meaning has not been lost; the first definition of “contemplation” in a recent Oxford dictionary is “looking thoughtfully at something for a long time.” And that seems to be more or less what Anaxagoras meant when someone inquired about the purpose of his existence—and one wonders what the reaction was, because his answer may have sounded almost as strange then as it does now. Maybe you should try it sometime: when the topic of conversation turns to the meaning of life, and someone asks you why you were born and why you’re alive, just calmly reply, “to look thoughtfully for a long time at the sun, and the moon, and the heavens.”

We’ve seen that from a theological-catechetical standpoint, the purpose of human life is “to know, love, and serve God in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next.” I also suggested, in the second article of this series, that from a more practical and quotidian standpoint, the purpose of life is to live in the depth of each moment and to pour our body and soul into the task at hand, that we might do the work entrusted to us as the heavenly Father desires it be done, and that we might thereby imitate the God-Man, who, according to Fr. Edward Leen,

saw the highest good in the doing of a thing, as His Father wanted it to be done—apart altogether from consequences.

But still, something is missing. The quotidian standpoint affords only a partial view, because it is oriented toward work, which is inferior to true leisure. And the theological-catechetical answer is also incomplete insofar as it focuses on what to do rather than how to do it. Look out into the lost souls and broken hearts of modernity—what do you see? Countless people who do not know how to know God, and do not know how to love Him, and are therefore unable or unwilling to serve Him. And even for those who do know God and try to love Him, even for those who go to church and obey the commandments and consider themselves good and faithful Christians—where are the saints? Where are the saints in this modern society of such dazzling wealth and such appalling poverty, this society so filled to gluttonous bursting with disposable trinkets and so fatally bereft of enduring goods that lifted our ancestors up above the dust from which they were made—bereft even, God forbid, of the stars, now all but snuffed out by a world that is too busy for the heavens, and that prefers the galling formlessness of electric lamps to the constellations that danced and sang in the night skies of the past.

“What,” the Psalmist wonders, “is man?”

I gaze at Thy heavens, the works of Thy fingers,
the moon and the stars, which Thou hast reposed.

Contemplation need not refer to that intensely mystical, supernatural experience of prayer which is out of reach for most mortals. The word acquired that meaning around the end of the Middle Ages. Contemplation understood as theoria—that is, as a reflective, participatory beholding of reality—is integral to the full flowering of every human life and to the sanctification of every human soul. Josef Pieper, one of the greatest modern philosophers, speaks eloquently in this regard:

For nothing less is at stake here than the ultimate fulfillment of human existence. We are really asking how such fulfilment may come about.… I am only trying to express the teaching found in the Western philosophical tradition. The most important element in this teaching declares: the ultimate fulfillment, the absolutely meaningful activity, the most perfect expression of being alive, the deepest satisfaction, and the fullest achievement of human existence must needs happen in an instance of beholding, namely, in the contemplating awareness of the world’s ultimate and intrinsic foundations.

Thus, contemplation is not so much the purpose of life as the inherently meaningful and supremely human state by which fulfillment of our purpose is made possible. The Church does not ask us to look into the heavens all day long; she asks us to know, love, and serve the One who made the heavens. But the trap of modern life is that the Maker fades away when we do not contemplate His works. Such a thing could hardly occur in medieval Christendom, which was an eminently contemplative age—and also, let us not forget, the Age of Faith. In the words of the Benedictine scholar Jean Leclercq,

The word ‘contemplation’ … meant, in the tradition of the Western Middle Ages, not seeing, but looking at, directing the attention of one’s mind towards God and his mysteries.

“Not seeing, but looking at”: modern man excels in seeing without looking, whereas every town, village, and monastery in medieval Europe was home to ordinary people, illiterate peasants among them, who knew how to look—who instinctively nourished their souls with that intentional, unitive gaze which embraces the many wonders of Creation but has for its ultimate object the eternal and unchanging and all-beautiful God.

Lent is a good time to renew the contemplative dimension of a Christian life. Contemplation is compatible with work and domestic obligations; in fact, the attitude toward daily tasks that I described in the previous article is essentially a means of making labor more contemplative. Nor does contemplation require monastic ascesis or severe mortification—though fasting does sharpen its edge a bit. Nor is it dependent on frequent access to a dark sky full of gleaming stars, but that certainly would help.

Artificial lighting, however, can be a problem; find a place to light some candles and pray the Psalms. You will see things in those poems that you cannot see anywhere else. And we should be wary of the worst—the absolute worst—enemy that contemplation has ever known: electronic screens, and the surrogate reality conjured up by the sorcerer-like software that controls them. We all must use them now. As legitimate tools and as a pragmatic substitute for physical paper, itself a “technology” of sorts, they have their place. But let us not deceive ourselves—they have become much more than legitimate tools and substitutes for paper.

To contemplate is to look, with the eyes and the mind, at God and His mysteries. A simple push of the power button will remind us that when we see an image on a screen, we’re looking at something that is just one tiny step away from nothing.

1. Lives of Eminent Philosophers, II.3: “ἐρωτηθείς ποτε εἰς τί γεγέννηται, ‘εἰς θεωρίαν,’ ἔφη, ‘ἡλίου καὶ σελήνης καὶ οὐρανοῦ.’”