Partakers of the Divine: Contemplation and the Practice of Philosophy

5. Contemplative Philosophy of Religion

5 Contemplative Philosophy of Religion A Participatory Approach A contemplative will . . . concern himself with the same problems as other people, but he will try to get to the spiritual and metaphysical roots of these problems—not by analysis but by simplicity. –—Thomas Merton1 Once, when [Bede Griffiths] and Barfield were lunching in my room, I happened to refer to philosophy as ‘a subject.’ ‘It wasn’t a subject to Plato,’ said Barfield, ‘it was a way.’ The quiet but fervent agreement of Griffiths, and the quick glance of understanding between these two, revealed to me my own frivolity. Enough had been thought, and said, and felt, and imagined. It was about time that something should be done. –—C. S. Lewis2 1. Thomas Merton, FAITH AND VIOLENCE (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 147. 2. C. S. Lewis, SURPRISED BY JOY: THE SHAPE OF MY EARLY LIFE, rev. ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1995), 218. 205 What are the prospects for contemplative philosophy today? I began this book by noting that in recent decades mystical and contemplative texts assumed a place of surprising philosophical importance for discussions in both the analytic and continental traditions. However, as we saw in chapter 1, most of these studies fail to treat the practices of the contemplative tradition as integrally bound to the tradition’s theories, metaphysics, and philosophical theologies. I argued that this way of treating the question has largely served to shipwreck inquiry from the outset, for the theories advanced within the contemplative tradition find their intelligibility only within the practices of contemplative theoria. If contemplatives come to see God beyond all finite determinations as the being who alone exists in a strict and absolute sense, the one supreme good, “needing nothing, but rather He upon whom all things depend in order that they may have being and well-being”;3 if they encounter God beyond the coincidence of opposites and the universe as iconically participating in the fullness of the divine plenitude—these understandings do not precede contemplative practice but, rather, issue from and arise with the work of prayer. I suggested, moreover, that the divorce between contemplation and philosophy has led to contemplation being sentimentalized as a pious ornament and philosophy banalized because alienated from its mystical and spiritual roots. Throughout this book, I have endeavored to show that the great contemplative authors of the past inherited a classical understanding of philosophy not as knowledge alone, but as a way of life. This contemplative and philosophical inheritance fundamentally involved a set of embodied traditions and practices of transformation that sought to open new emotional, volitional, social, and cognitive capacities. Moreover, as we saw in the chapters on both Anselm and Nicholas of Cusa, these newly cultivated capacities were allied to a particular kind of metaphysics (i.e., the metaphysics of participation) and themselves transformed the kind of philosophy and theology such contemplatives produced, thus binding practice and theory together in a kind of vital circle. Much of my argument has, of necessity, involved a sustained engagement with premodern thinkers, one that I intended more as a creative retrieval than as an exercise in purely historical inquiry. In this concluding chapter, however, I want to turn my attention more fully to the demands of our own age. One apparent objection to all of the foregoing might run as follows: whatever its historical validity may be, all of this talk of contemplation as an ally of philosophy is either willful or hopelessly anachronistic. Even if we reject 3. Anselm of Canterbury, St. Anselm’s Proslogion with a Reply on Behalf of the Fool, trans. M. J. Charlesworth (Notre Dame, IN.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), ch. 22. 206 | Partakers of the Divine normative secularity as a substantive condition of philosophy’s existence, as much theology and philosophy of religion have rightly done, we can hardly dispense with the procedural or formal norm of dispassionate and objective reason as, at least, a communicative ideal. Put simply, as soon as you begin asking philosophers to pray or meditate or engage in some other such activity, you have stopped doing philosophy. But is this really this case? “The affinity of priest and philosopher is an archaic one,” says William Desmond. “The priest may be the older brother of the two, but both are originally of the same family.”4 Modernity, as Weber, Blumenberg, Habermas, and others tell us, essentially...