In all the great religious traditions men and women have dedicated themselves to contemplative lives in which, under special conditions of silence, austerity, solitude, meditation and worship, it had been possible for them to deepen and broaden their spiritual consciousness. In so doing, they have become able to explore realms of experience which, though unusual, have profound implications for the ordinary lives of their fellow men. Whether from the point of view of psychology, ethics, art, religion, or simply in the development of man’s deepest capacities, the contemplative experience is in touch with what is most basic in human existence.

In religious cultures these contemplatives have tended to form recognized elites in special monastic institutions. But it is not necessary that this drive for spiritual discovery be socially organized: it can spring into existence spontaneously outside the cloister or hermitage, even under the most unfavorable conditions. For the contemplative life is not merely a matter of escaping the world, singing psalms, or mastering traditional techniques of meditation: it is also and above all a personal charism.

Thus there are contemplatives not only in monasteries but also in the midst of secular life. But in all contemplative traditions, it has been found necessary that those who have attained to some depth of religious insight should to some extent guide others who seek to attain the same experience of truth in their own lives. Thus though the contemplative lives in silence and seeks to maintain a certain freedom from involvement in feverish and pointless activity, he does not simply turn his back on the world of other men. Like them he remains rooted in this world. He remains open to the world and is ready, when necessary, to share with others something of his own experience, to the extent that this may be desirable or possible. He also realizes his need to listen to other men and learn from them. But above all he seeks to go deeper into that divine source from which all life springs, and to understand the destinies of man in the light of God.

At a time when the Catholic Church herself has entered into a spontaneous and living dialogue with modern man on all levels of his existence, should Catholic contemplatives also speak to modern man and listen to him, question him and be questioned by him?

The “Message of Contemplatives” presented to the Synod of Bishops in fall 1967 reflected a deep concern on the part of men who, though dedicated to lives of silence and solitude, felt they also had a duty to share the fruit of their experience with their fellow men struggling in the modern “crisis of faith.” The life of solitude and contemplation, a life in which men listen more intently to the Word of God, immerse themselves in meditation of the Bible, sing the praise of God in liturgy, and devote themselves to work, study and silent prayer, is not a life remote from contemporary reality. Nor is the contemplative exempt from the problems and difficulties of contemporary man. The life of Christian contemplation is not a life of willful concentration upon a few clear and comforting ideas, but a life of inner struggle in which the monk, like Christ himself in the desert, is tested. In a certain sense the monk, alone with God, fully aware of his own poverty, fallibility and blindness, suffers the same trial of faith as other Christians, and suffers it in a more acute and penetrating way. It can be said that the contemplative is often less a “professional of vision” than a professional of crisis and of intellectual suffering. What he learns is not a clearer idea of God but a deeper trust, a purer love and a more complete abandonment to One he knows to be beyond all understanding. Yet in his silence, his simple life, his cloistered peace, the contemplative certainly has access to values which modem life tends more and more to forget, to underestimate or to ignore. He wishes to share his experience of these values with other men who are weary of the pressure, the confusion, the agitation of modern life. He recognizes his duty to his fellow man: a duty to preserve for him an area which is most threatened in the stormy existence of a world in a crisis of growth and transformation. The following thoughts can be considered in some sense an extension of the “Message of Contemplatives” delivered to the Synod of Bishops.

We contemplatives are fully aware not only of the general problems confronted by the Christian believer, but also more especially of the particular problem of the contemplative life itself. Many Christians, including priests and even perhaps some bishops, perturbed by the great needs of the Church in the world today, wonder how the contemplatives can continue to remain apparently aloof from the active conflicts in which the Church is engaged. Should not contemplatives abandon their silence and solitude in order to be enlisted in the busy army of apostolic workers?

We contemplatives feel that this question is, for us as well as for the rest of the Church, only another aspect of the general crisis of faith. We know this because we have often searched our own hearts and sought to resolve this question for ourselves, fearing that perhaps our call to desert solitude might be an illusion, and dreading that we might be making our silence a pretext for refusing to others a necessary service. Indeed we do realize that we cannot be content with a purely negative rejection of the world. We cannot simply turn our backs on contemporary man. That is not our intention. We must on the contrary share with others something of the benefits of our own life of prayer.

Nevertheless, it is clear to us that our greatest and most unique service to the Church is precisely our life of contemplation itself. Our silence and solitude are not mere luxuries and privileges which we have acquired at the Church’s expense: they are necessary gifts of God to the Church in and through us. They are that part of the precious inheritance of Christian truth and experience which God has confided to us to hold in trust, in order that the spirit of prayer and contemplation may continue to exist in the whole Church and in the world of our time.

The laity and clergy who are absorbed in many active concerns are unable to give themselves to meditation and to a deeper study of divine and human things. We feel it is our first duty to preserve for them the reality of a life of deep prayer, silence, and experience of the things of God so that they may not themselves despair, but may be encouraged to continue in their own way to seek intimacy with God in loving faith. We also feel it our obligation, at least where circumstances permit, to allow them to share in the peace and silence of our retreats. Some of us may be called to direct or instruct others in the way of prayer, whether by the written word or by oral direction. Some of us, finally, may be called to enter into fruitful dialogue with intellectuals, Christian or otherwise, and perhaps particularly with contemplatives and philosophers of the non-Christian religious traditions. Ideally speaking, the contemplative monastery should present a perfect setting for dialogue and study concerning prayer and spiritual experience.

However, we may be permitted to suggest that it would be to the greatest possible disadvantage for the Church if contemplatives were to be uprooted from their silent and prayerful way of life and precipitated into active works for which they are neither qualified nor prepared and which they can only do badly. At the same time we realize more and more that the contemplative life itself urgently needs inner renewal in order that this experience of mystical love, which has unfortunately grown cold, this contemplative apprehension of divine things which has become weak and vague, may recover their vital power.

In order to do this, it is necessary for us to maintain the purity of monastic common life in which the freedom of fraternal love in Christ, the discipline of monastic formation, and total obedience of one and all to the Holy Spirit keep alive an atmosphere of prayer in which the authentic purity of Christian contemplation can be handed on from spiritual father to spiritual sons. We recognize especially the importance of silence, solitude, poverty, labor, humility, chastity, fasting and all the traditional forms of monastic ascesis, to keep ourselves open and attentive to the Spirit of the Living God. We also recognize that, as contemplatives grow in their experience of intimacy with God they will need special opportunities to develop their own personal gifts in their own ways, some of them perhaps living for this purpose in eremitical solitude. In a word, we not only bear witness to the living actuality of the monastic experience that has been handed down to us from the earliest days of Egyptian and Syrian monasticism, but we solemnly pledge ourselves to preserve that heritage and to develop it in ways that are relevant to our own time.

The contemplative life is questioned not only in the active and dynamic West but in the meditative East. In a certain sense the duty to bear witness to contemplative values and to a higher experience, is a matter of universal concern, common not only to the Cistercian monk but to the Zen Buddhist and the student of Yoga. We find that many who do not share our religious belief, men of the great Asian religions, or even modem Westerners without faith, tend to have a better appreciation of our life than some Catholics. These men often deeply value the advantages of solitude, silence and meditation. The appeals of such men urge us to persevere in our aim of seeking new depths of awareness and meaning in human existence. They also encourage us to study the ways in which the religious experience of the great mystical traditions, both Christian and non-Christian, can continue in dialogue with a world that has ceased to understand the classic language of religious experience. They encourage us to approach closer to the mystery of God in that desert solitude which is the place par excellence of revelation, inspiration and renewal.

In this connection we observe that a Marxist thinker prominent in the Marxist-Christian dialogue has, while clearly stating that to him the language of Christian theology seemed irrelevant, admitted that he found the mystical experience and witness of a St. Teresa of Avila both meaningful and challenging. On the basis of such statements as these, we do not feel that we contemplatives are losing our time if we devote our lives to exploring areas which other more active Catholics consider a mere no man’s land.

Like the rest of the Catholic Church, the contemplative Orders seek a renewal of their life in accordance with the needs of modern man. The maturity and personal fulfillment sought by one called to the contemplative life are to be found in contemplation itself and not elsewhere. But the discipline of contemplative attention and awareness has to be adapted to the needs of modem consciousness. Contemplative formation today will include a study of the structures of modem consciousness, and its new ways of experiencing itself in relation to other men, to the world, and to God.

It should be remarked that in the contemplative life, while study and intellectual development are of great importance, there is something else more important still: the realm of personal experience which penetrates beyond the limits of speculative thought to “taste” the ultimate realities and to penetrate the inner meaning of what is believed and yet remains obscure. For the contemplative, then, what matters is not speculative discussion of the “problem of God,” still less the effort to demonstrate the existence of God in ways that often raise more problems than they solve for modern man. The contemplative is not one who has to do battle with militant atheism and he is thus perhaps in a position to gain a clearer understanding of the confusions now surrounding the whole question of “atheism” and the “problem of God” in the world of our time.

The Christian contemplative is aware that in the mystical tradition both of the Eastern and Western Churches there is a strong element of what has been called “apophatic theology.” This “apophatic” tradition concerns itself with the most fundamental datum of all faith—and one which is too often forgotten: the God who has revealed Himself to us in His Word has revealed Himself as unknown in His intimate essence, for He is beyond all merely human vision. “You cannot see my face: no man shall see me and live” (Exodus 33:20). “No man has ever seen God: the only-begotten, who is in the heart of the Father, he has related it” (John 1:18) .

The heart of the Christian mystical experience is that it experiences the ineffable reality of what is beyond experience. It “knows” the presence of God, not in clear vision but “as unknown” (tamquam ignotium). Christian faith too, while of course concerning itself with certain truths that have been revealed by God, does not terminate in the conceptual formulation of those truths. It goes beyond words and ideas and attains to God Himself. But the God who in a certain sense is “known” in the articles of faith is “known as unknown” beyond those articles. One might even say, with some of the Fathers of the Church, that while our concepts may tell us that “God is,” our knowledge of God beyond those concepts is a knowledge of Him “as though He were not” since His Being is not accessible to us in direct experience. We are persuaded that many who consider themselves atheists are in fact persons who are discontented with a naive idea of God which makes Him appear to be an “object” or a “thing,” or a person in a merely finite and human sense. Such people are perhaps weary of the complications of language which now surrounds the “problem of God” and find all discussions of that problem fruitless: yet they are likely to be very intrigued by the direct and existential testimony of contemplative experience.

Now, while the Christian contemplative must certainly develop, by study, the theological understanding of concepts about God, he is called mainly to penetrate the wordless darkness and apophatic light of an experience beyond concepts, and here he gradually becomes familiar with a God who is “absent,” and as it were “nonexistent,” to all human experience. The apophatic experience of God does, to some extent, verify the atheist’s intuition that God is not an object of limited and precise knowledge and consequently cannot be apprehended as “a thing” to be studied by delimitation. As St. John of the Cross dared to say in mystical language, the term of the ascent of the mount of contemplation is “Nothing”—Y en ei monte Nada. But the dif-erence between the apophatic contemplative and the atheist is that where the experience of the atheist may be purely negative, that of the contemplative is so to speak negatively positive. Relinquishing every attempt to grasp God in limited human concepts, the contemplatives’s act of submission and faith attains to His presence as the ground of every human experience and to His reality as the ground of being itself. The “absence” of the transcendent God is also paradoxically His presence as immanent. Here obviously we enter a realm of apparent contradictions which eludes clear explanation, so that the contemplative prefers not to talk about it at all. Indeed, in the past, serious mistakes have been made and deadly confusions have arisen from inadequate attempts to explain this mystery. The job of the contemplative today is not to avoid this area out of fear—this is the authentic field of his exploration and the place of his own promised and desired fulfillment—he must enter into it humbly and resolutely, following the call of God and obedient to the divine Spirit, like Moses approaching the burning bush, removing the “shoes” of opinion and rationalization.

There is however a new atheism which has arisen even among Christians in their anxiety to share every dimension of modern men’s experience. These “Christian atheists” have asked themselves, in all sincerity, if one could be a truly modern man and not be in some sense an atheist. In other words, is religious belief so essentially alien to the experience and consciousness of modern man that modern man cannot believe in God without a psychological and cultural regression to modes of thought appropriate to former ages but estranged from our own? Since this “Christian atheism” or “religion without God” has had the benefit of a typically sensationalist treatment in the mass media, and since those who have proposed it differ greatly among themselves and do not always mean the same thing, there has been great confusion in the minds of many people. Sometimes the doctrine

of the so-called “death of God,” popular in American Christian circles, is reduced to a mere sensational absurdity. But at other times an attempt is made to raise a serious question in this paradoxical form. The “problem of God,” it is said, has new dimensions today because one can no longer take for one’s point of departure the same assumptions as in the past. For instance, in the past it was more generally taken for granted that every man had a basic natural way of looking at reality, and this spontaneous, preconscious outlook included in it the need for a Supreme Being and at least some kind of tacit assumption of a first cause. Men who denied the Supreme Being and the first cause did so at the price of resisting this natural outlook. But now it is asserted that man’s outlook has radically changed. It is no longer “natural” for him to assume, as St. Anse1m once assumed, that if there are any beings at all there must be a Supreme Being. On the contrary, it is now said that modern man’s consciousness is one which no longer needs God and no longer assumes His existence, influence and presence as the basis for a meaningful view of life. What could be said with truth in the past, that the human soul was “naturally Christian,” is no longer to be taken for granted: on the contrary, the consciousness of modern man is, according to this theory, naturally atheistic. Therefore it is contended that as far as the experience of modem man is concerned, “God is dead”—he is not present spontaneously as the basis for meaning in human existence. On the contrary, if “God” once becomes present in the consciousness of modem man, so the argument continues, his presence does violence to that modern consciousness in its modernity—hence in its truth. The act of faith by which modem man adheres, in spite of himself, to the idea of God is an act in which he is untrue to himself, is dictated by fear or some other base motive, and is therefore unauthentic. Faith, for the modern man, must then be by definition “bad faith” in the sense given to this term by J. P. Sartre.

We have exposed this argument in some detail because it has rather ironical consequences in the lives of those who are most concerned with being “adult” Christians in the world of today. Obviously one of the first indications of the adult is that he is securely assured of his own identity, and his judgments concerning his own experiences are based on his own awareness of what takes place within himself. The truly modem adult person will.

surely not allow himself to be treated as an alienated and helpless individual whose inner experience is dictated to him by another and imposed upon him from the outside. It is the surest sign of immaturity, to be imposed on entirely by the ideas and ideals of others and to substitute these for one’s own true personal experience and judgment of life. The faith of the Christian is an inner adherence to a truth which is not imposed from the outside. It is a free personal adherence of love “in the Spirit” and it gives power to resist all external compulsion in the realm of thought as well as of life. In this sense, too, faith overcomes the world. This truth makes one truly and authentically free (John 8:32). The adult Christian is perfectly capable of discovering for himself whether or not a modern man can believe in God and experience Him without being untrue to himself. There is a difference between being true to oneself and being A la mode. After all, St. Paul has cautioned us against confusing the wisdom and the experience of God with the slogans of current intellectual fashion (I Cor. 2:6-9).

In actual fact, the gift of supernatural faith does not in any way depend on whether or not man is naturally disposed to accept easily a congenial concept of God. It is after all quite common for us in dechristianized cultures to encounter persons who have never had a serious thought of God, one way or the other, and who have suddenly been struck, in the most unaccountable manner, by the light of faith. It is customary among pious people to imagine that this is always a beautiful and consoling experience. It is sometimes frightening. You fortunate believer! You do not know the confusion, the bewilderment and the suffering of an atheist who has suddenly, without any apparent human intervention, been literally overwhelmed by the reality of God, and who does not know what to do. Surrounded by friends who can only mock him, if he reveals his trouble, unable to pray, unable to trust himself to the Church of which he is highly suspicious, he is in a state of heartbreaking anguish. Perhaps it may be true that he is not a “naturally Christian soul.” God does not present Himself to him in a clear and comforting concept, but as a completely disconcerting and incxplicable reality, making a demand for total commitment and trust. His anguish is all the greater, but his faith is no less real. And he turns, instinctively, to the contemplatives who, he believes, are men of prayer and know the ways of God. But when he comes to us, in profound distress, we become aware of our own insufficiency: and we carefully weigh any words we may say, knowing that they must not be sentimental or complacent or merely formal. The writer of these lines has recently had one of many such experiences: and he knows that it is utterly false to claim that “modern man is incapable of feeling the need for God; or responding to His presence.”

‘We are inclined to ask here, whether these facile assumptions about modern man and his psychology are not totally gratuitous. That would be a matter for psychology, sociology and historical scholarship to decide, in terms of the evidence. But once again, those who are familiar with the apophatic tradition in theology and mysticism are fully aware that the temporary or permanent inability to imagine God or to “experience” Him as present, or even to find Him credible, is not something discovered by modern man or confined to our own age. This view of religion and of the religious consciousness is too narrow and foreshortened, for it once more assumes that the naive conception of God as “object” is somehow claimed as natural to man and essential to Christianity.

‘Without entering into a polemic with this new school of thought, we can at least recognize that it is doubtless time for the Christian consciousness of God to be expressed in contemporary language. The conceptual knowledge of God is inevitably associated with a certain cultural matrix. The medieval ideas of God were naturally in accord with medieval thought about the cosmos, about the earth, about physics, and about the biological and psychological structure of man. These ideas have been revolutionized. But the reality of experience beyond concepts (though it may call for a different approach in accord with the new psychological and cultural development of modern man) is not itself modified by changes of culture. The contemplative once again has a certain advantage due to the fact that he is less involved than others in changing conceptual structures and less dependent on the complexities of language.

Far from being a merely mental and conceptual approach to God, far from being the fruit of intellectual speculation which seeks to apprehend God as a most rarefied abstraction, the contemplative approach is highly concrete and existential. Where abstract thought and concrete existence enter into conflict, the mark of the true contemplative is that he is on the side of concrete existence. Our God is the living God who has manifested Himself with supreme concreteness to man, not only in words and deeds by which He intervened in human history for our salvation, but above all in His Son whom the Apostles “heard and saw and touched with their hands and recognized to be the Word of Life” (see I John 1:1) . The Christian contemplative is not content to explore the depths of the human psyche and to expand the capacities of natural consciousness. The heart of Christian contemplation is the revelation of the invisible God. The Christian contemplative seeks the fullest and most living participation in the experience which has come down from those who walked with Christ on earth, who knew him and saw him as risen and received from him the Gift of the Spirit.

The Christian contemplative life bears witness above all to the deepest and most central truth of all Christian revelation, that of the Holy Trinity. At first sight, nothing could be seemingly more remote from the modem consciousness and more alien to it than the mysterious notion of One God in Three Persons. The modem consciousness is impatient of mystery and impervious to technical theology. One would expect that the danger of abstractness and technicality would make modem contemplatives turn more spontaneously to God in His unity and simplicity rather than to this mystery of God as triune. But on the contrary, the special character of Christian contemplation cannot be grasped unless due importance is given to the revelation of the Father in the Son by the Holy Spirit. We have obviously no intention of entering into a technical discussion of the theology of the Trinity, but only of pointing out why this theology is important both in itself and in special relation to our own time.

Since, as we have said above, God is, in His intimate essence, beyond all our human concepts, the revelation of God as Father, Son and Spirit is in fact a revelation of Him as totally other than any being which we can conceive of as existing. In God’s revelation of Himself we nowhere find Him giving a definition of Himself. He simply reveals that He is (Exodus 3:14). Or rather He reveals that He is who He is: that is to say he reveals Himself not as a thing but as a presence, an active living and personal identity. And this identity, this “Who,” is at once Father, Son or Logos, and Spirit or Pneuma. This revelation of God as who He is (not as what) is therefore a revelation of Him as living, personal presence, as utterance of Himself, as communication of Himself, as love, as mercy, as gift, as life. The self-revelation of God as the Father in the Son through the Spirit, is the self-revelation of infinite giving and dynamic personal communication. We say with St. John that “God is love” (I John 4:16), and we recognize with the Apostle that the God who is love is known to no one except to him who loves. God is Father who gives Himself in love as Son; He is Son who gives Ilimself as love in Spirit; He is Spirit who communicates to us the immense love which we believe to be Father and Son, so that we ourselves, in the Spirit, become sons and give ourselves in love to the Father. This is the self-manifestation of God as the infinite personal ground of all love and all being, of God as loving Creator of all things, not only infinitely transcendent but also present within the metaphysical depths and goodness of being itself. God thus reveals Himself not simply as the power to cause all effects, but as the Act and Living Presence of Love from whom all beings receive the loving and gratuitous gift to be real.

It is very important to grasp the significance of the fact that God is not conceived by Christian theology as numerically three. The three divine persons are not three countable things or three beings or three natures or three objects lined up, so to speak, side by side: they are (and here the inadequacy of human speech makes itself felt, since we have to use the plural) the inner communication and dynamism of love in which God is present to Himself in Being, Vision and Love, or perhaps we might say in Reality, in Realization and in Ecstatic Delight.

Christian contemplation does not of course imply a clear vision, or a rational understanding of the processions of the divine persons on a technical theological level. What we mean to emphasize here is something quite different: that Christian contemplation gives a certain intuitive appreciation or savor of the divine inner life in so far as it is a personal participation, by grace, in that life itself. Thus the Christian contemplative experiences in himself, in the love which is granted to him by the gift of the Spirit, something of the dynamism of love that the unknown God has revealed as His actuality, His presence, His identity, His personal and intimate self-communication. The loving knowledge of God is then not something to be acquired by objective study but by subjective (personal) identification (which traditional theology has called “connaturality”). St. Paul makes this clear when he compares a man’s consciousness of his own identity to the Spirit “which looks into the depths of God” (I Cor. z:io). Now we have received the Spirit of God, and hence the Spirit in us gazes into the abyss of the unknown and unseen Father. We recognize the unseen Father in so far as we are sons, in and with Christ. The Spirit utters in us the cry of recognition that we are sons in the Son (Romans 8:15). This cry of admiration, of love, of praise, of everlasting joy is at once a cry of glad self-annihilation on the part of our transient human ego, and an exultant shout of victory of the New Man raised from the dead in Christ by the Spirit who raised Christ himself from the dead. Christian contemplation, in one vivid blaze of love and illumination, apprehends at once the reality of God as the totally other and the unknown, as a dynamism of reality, realization and ecstasy, as incarnate in Jesus Christ, as given to us entirely in the Spirit, as taking us entirely to Himself in the death and resurrection of Christ. But Christian contemplation is not merely lost in God. It also includes in its vision an eschatological understanding of the world redeemed in Christ.

It sees the world transformed in the divine light, it sees all things recapitulated in Christ (Eph. 1:1o). It is aware of the victory of Christ and the reality of his Kingdom in the world even now, in all the confusion, the chaos and the risk of this historical and revolutionary time of crisis which we call the atomic age.

It is by deepening this Christian consciousness and developing the capacity for mystical understanding and love that the Christian contemplative keeps alive in the Church that pure and immediate experience without which theology will always lack one of its most important dimensions. The Second Vatican Council has reminded us of this:

For there is a growth in the understanding of the realities of the words which have been handed down. This happens through the contemplation and study made by believers who treasure these things in their hearts (Luke 2:19,51) through the intimate understanding of spiritual things they experience, and through the preaching of those who have received through episcopal succession the pure gift of truth. (On Revelation, ii, 8)

Here the Council makes very clear the importance of contemplatives in the Church. Their special task is not merely to pray for those in the active apostolate, but much more to keep alive and to deepen the “intimate understanding” of and “experience” through which divine revelation is handed down not merely in Christian preaching but as a living and experienced reality.

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