Commentary: Reading and Healing

Reading, Healing, and the History of Western Meditation

I

We do not have an adequate history of the Western tradition of meditation. Nor do we have a clear idea of what such a history would be about, since the terms commonly used to describe meditation in the European languages have rather different histories. These include accounts of mental exercises, ascetic and devotional practices, and numerous literary genres.

There are good reasons why this history does not exist. Teachers in the humanities generally believe that meditation is a topic in religion. As a result, the study of meditative practices does not have a well-defined place in the secular thinking about the humanities that has arisen since the Enlightenment. Opposition to Western meditative traditions is also encountered in the health sciences, where contemplative practice has played a significant role in mind-body healing for some two generations. Caregivers who make use of meditation prefer Eastern methods, and these are usually presented to patients in a decontextualized manner in order to avoid the accusation of bias. Consultants for businesses who offer instruction in "emotional competence" by means of meditation likewise aim at cultural neutrality, effectively ruling out Western teachings in the field.

Another motive for this reticence arises from the fact that in the West, as in the East, meditation has a dark side to which enthusiastic devotees of the practice seldom make reference. This concerns the use of meditative techniques for destructive ends. The concentrated attention that is acquired by means of lessons in meditation, for example in the Japanese martial arts, is a highly rigorous form of mental discipline, and this discipline can be put to good or bad uses. Many opponents of civilized values—terrorists, suicide bombers, and political fanatics of various stripes—have sustained their views with the aid of the methods of one or another style of meditation.

These are just some of the reasons why we do not have a coherent view of the evolution of Western thinking in the field. Yet the documentary sources for writing such a history are reasonably well known, and contributions have been made over the years within individual disciplines, such as art, literature, philosophy, and theology. Based on the work that has been done to date, we can say that this story is broadly divisible into four chronological segments: ancient, medieval, modern, and eclectic.

The first period begins in remote Greek and Jewish antiquity and finishes sometime between the death of Augustine in 430 and Proclus in 485. During this lengthy epoch meditation can be said to have a place in either philosophy or religion, depending on whether one's perspective on the subject arises from Athens or Jerusalem. Within Greek, Latin, and Hebrew culture, there are many groups that engage in disciplined contemplative practices. But, with the exception of a handful of philosophical schools and ascetic communities, they are not in touch with each other, even within their respective linguistic and geographic regions. As a result of this autonomy, there are no comprehensive terms in the ancient world for describing what comes to be known in Latin as meditatio or contemplatio. The working out of a commonly accepted vocabulary for talking about the subject is largely the result of patristic thinking in the first five centuries of the Common Era.

I have called the second segment of this unwritten history "medieval," but this term does not accurately delimit the chronological boundaries in question, which include late antiquity at one end and the early modern period at the other. The terminus ad quem can be put at 1650, a year that is close to the median date between the deaths of three of the best-known proponents of meditation in the seventeenth century, namely John Donne, René Descartes, and Blaise Pascal. Thus defined, the long medieval Christian epoch is the most creative in the development of Western meditation, paralleling comparable expansions of the field in Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Islam.

During this period many original applications for contemplative thinking take place in art, music, philosophy, theology, and literature. Images and texts emerge as a combined force in Western meditative experience...