Introduction: Contemplationand PhilosophyFor wisdom is more mobile than anymotion; because of her pureness shepervades and penetrates all things. For sheis a breath of the power of God, and a pureemanation of the glory of the Almighty;therefore nothing defiled gains entrance intoher. For she is a reflection of eternal light, aspotless mirror of the working of God, andan image of his goodness. Although she isbut one, she can do all things, and whileremaining in herself, she renews all things;in every generation she passes into holysouls and makes them friends of God, andprophets; for God loves nothing so muchas the person who lives with wisdom. Sheis more beautiful than the sun, and excelsevery constellation of the stars.

WISDOM OF SOLOMON 7:24-30

The passage above, from the apocryphal book The Wisdom of Solomon, writtenin Greek by an Alexandrian Jew sometime in the first century bce, bearswitness to a conversation, even a contest, between philosophy and biblicalfaith. The text has its own polemicsthe author, for example, regularly takesaim especially at the Epicureans for their ungodliness, lawlessness, andlicentiousnessbut while it seeks to provide a biblical corrective tophilosophical error, at the same time it refuses to abandon philosophy as thelove of wisdom. Instead, The Wisdom of Solomon bears witness to an authorand a community of reflection able to imagine that the love of wisdom andintimacy with God are not in contest with each other, but are, rather, rightlyconstrued, coordinate with one another. Wisdom is a breath of the power of

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God and a mirror of Gods good working. She makes her companions into Godscompanions: friends of God and prophets.

In the Christian tradition, from Augustine to Teresa of Avila to ThomasMerton, friendship with God has often been spoken about in terms ofcontemplation. In this book, I endeavor to see whether and how far we canretrieve the kind of constructive, integral meeting imagined by The Wisdom ofSolomon in our own modern and postmodern age. This is, then, a book aboutcontemplation (especially Christian contemplation) and philosophythe waysin which they are related, how they might transform one another, and the endsto which they are ordered. And so it is a work not only of philosophy but alsoof theology: mystical and philosophical theology, in particular. The relationshipbetween mystical theology and philosophical theology is a fascinating andcomplex one, but it is one that has too regularly gone unaddressed. Too often,the mystical is associated with the irrational and philosophy with the exclusivelyrational.

There are, however, encouraging signs that this oppositional way ofconstruing things might be changing. In recent years, both analytic andcontinental philosophers of religion have turned their attention to texts drawnfrom contemplative traditionsit is no longer surprising to find writers such asTeresa of Avila, Dionysus the Areopagite, Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart,and many others referenced in the footnotes of philosophical argumentbutthis contemporary philosophical appeal to the contemplative tradition is onlypartial. Contemplatives are summoned into philosophy, whether analytic orcontinental, merely as examples and rarely as philosophers or even thinkers intheir own right, the hackneyed charge of irrationalism still lurking somewherenearby. Theologians, a few notable exceptions notwithstanding, often fare littlebetter than the philosophers. It seems to be the case that in both philosophy andtheology contemplation remains a topic of fascination but is, in itself, seen assomething quite alien to the proper tasks of theologizing and philosophizing.In this book, by contrast, I argue that the meeting of contemplation andphilosophy can go much deeper than this. I endeavor to ask the followingquestion: Is it possible to have not just a philosophy (or even a theology) aboutcontemplation but to have instead a genuinely contemplative philosophy?

What Is Contemplation?A contemplative philosophy, if it is possible, will be something different fromwhat we might call the philosophy of contemplation. The latter pursuit couldbe construed as a subdiscipline within philosophy of religion or philosophy of

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mind and it would aim to make clear the nature and scope of contemplation,aspects of its historical development, and the issues contemplation raises forbasic philosophical pursuits in epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and so forth.This would be a valuable project, but it is not mine, at least not here. Myconcern in these pages is, instead, to determine whether there isnt a priorrelationship between contemplation and philosophy, a relationship out of whichboth philosophy and contemplation emerge and through which they continueto transform one another. Nevertheless, even if this book is not an exercise inthe philosophy of contemplation as such, neither can it eschew all the questionsproper to such an inquiry. After all, contemplation, the contemplative tradition,and other such terms are not words or phrases most ordinary people or evenmost philosophers and theologians regularly use, so it will be helpful to definecertain terms before beginning.

GENERIC CONTEMPLATIONWith roots in the old French contemplatio and the Latin contemplatinem, thelexical range of the English noun contemplation is wide, passing from theaction of beholding, or looking at with attention and thought, through toreligious musing or devout meditation (these latter being the earliest Englishmeanings of the word).1 Ordinary usage makes it plain that contemplationcomes in different forms: the sense of the word varies, for instance, accordingto whether we are speaking about a monks daily contemplation and prayer,Socrates contemplation of mortality, or the aesthetic contemplation one mightpursue while standing before Chagalls Les Maries de la Tour Eiffel in Nice. Forthe purposes of this book, we need some philosophical clarifications to helpus navigate this semantic diversity. Let us consider Generic Contemplationa form of human activity involving the exercise of sustained attention andthe cultivation of awareness leading to states of subjective expansion, wonder,tranquility, illumination, or communion.2

1. "Contemplation, n.". OED Online. September 2013. Oxford University Press.http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/40094?redirectedFrom=contemplation.

2. Cf. the definition of contemplation that Brown Universitys Harold Roth has provided as part of theefforts to establish the interdisciplinary field of contemplative studies. For Roth, contemplation is [t]hefocusing of the attention in a sustained fashion leading to deepened states of concentration, tranquility,and insight. It occurs on a spectrum ranging from the rather common, uncultivated, spontaneousexperiences of absorption in an activity to the most profound, deliberately cultivated experiences ofnonduality. See Harold Roth, Developments in Contemplative Studies, Association for ContemplativeMind in Higher Education, May 27, 2009, http://vimeo.com/5076639.

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That Generic Contemplation is a matter of attention or awareness alertsus to its standing as a species of knowledge by acquaintance. The GermanThomistic philosopher Josef Pieper defined contemplation as the silentperception of reality. He likens this silent perception to intuition, consideringit an act of the scholastic intellectus rather than the ratio.3 One knows theobject of contemplation directly, but, as B. Alan Wallace notes, unlike our usualexperience of objective knowledge, contemplation does not merely movetowards its object; it already rests in it.4 This resting in the object of onescontemplationwhether that object be a thing, person, mood, act, being itself,or even the Good beyond beingbegins to account for the second half of ourdefinition. Generic Contemplation is a participatory event that involves theknower in the object of his or her knowledge and this participation, ratherthan ruining or merely undoing the subject, issues instead in certain salutarystates. In other words, there is a kind of qualitative difference between GenericContemplation and, for instance, a state of fixation, obsession, or any of themore invidious forms of absorption to which humans are susceptible. Perhapssubjective expansion, wonder, tranquility, illumination, and communion fail toexhaust these happy consequences of Generic Contemplation. No matter. Mypoint here is only that the cultivation of awareness and attention in GenericContemplation aims at and is taken to facilitate the occurrence of integrativestates marked by these and similar qualities.

Why call Generic Contemplation a human activity? After all, doesntAristotle argue that human happiness is to be found in contemplation preciselybecause contemplation is the activity of the gods, and of all beings the gods aremost happy and blessed?5 Suppose we allow that gods and angels and other suchbeings do indeed spend their lives in contemplation; still, the contemplationof purely spiritual or supernatural beings would be something different thanthe act of embodied beings engaged in Generic Contemplation. We could,if pressed, designate their contemplation Supernatural Contemplation, or

3. On the distinction between the intellectus and the ratio, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.1ad. 1. Intellect and reason are different according to their different ways of knowing; because theintellect knows by simple intuition, while reason knows by a discursive process of moving from onething to another. [Intellectus et ratio different quantum ad modum cognoscendi, quia scil. Intellectus cognoscitsimplici intuitu, ratio vero discurrendo de uno in aliud.] Unless otherwise stated, all translation from theSumma Theologiae are taken from the English translation by Fathers of the Eng