To meditate is to exercise the mind in serious reflection. This is the broadest possible sense of the word "meditation." The term in this sense is not confined to religious reflections, but it implies serious mental activity and a certain absorption or concentration which does not permit our faculties to wander off at random or to remain slack and undirected.
From the very start it must be made clear, however, that reflection here does not refer to a purely intellectual activity, and still less does it refer to mere reasoning. Reflection involves not only the mind but also the heart, and indeed our whole being. One who really meditates does not merely think, he also loves, and by his love--or at least by his sympathetic intuition into the reality upon which he reflects--he enters into that reality and knows it so to speak from within, but a kind of identification.
St. Thomas and St. Bernard of Clairvaux describe meditation as "the quest for truth." Nevertheless their "meditation" is something quite distinct from study, which is also a "quest for truth." Meditation and study can, of course, be closely related. In fact, study is not spiritually fruitful unless it leads to some kind of meditation. By study we seek the truth in books or in some other source outside our own minds. In meditation we strive to absorb what we have already taken in. We consider the principles we have learned and we apply them to our own lives. Instead of simply storing up facts and ideas in our memory, we strive to do some original thinking of our own.
In study we can be content with an idea or a concept that is true. We can be content to know about truth. Meditation is for those who are not satisfied with a merely objective and conceptual knowledge about life, about God--about ultimate realities. They want to enter into an intimate contact with truth itself, with God. They want to experience the deepest realities of life by living them. Meditation is the means to that end.
And so, although the definition of meditation as a quest for truth brings out the fact that meditation is above all a function of the intelligence, nevertheless it implies something more. St. Thomas and St. Bernard were speaking of a kind of meditation which is fundamentally religious, or at least philosophical, and which aims at bringing our whole being into communication with an ultimate reality beyond and above ourselves. This unitive and loving knowledge begins in meditation but it reaches its full development only in contemplative prayer.
This idea is very important. Strictly speaking, even religious meditation is primarily a matter of thought. But it does not end in thought. Meditative thought is simply the beginning of a process which leads to interior prayer and is normally supposed to culminate in contemplation and in affective communion with God. We can call this whole process (in which meditation leads to contemplation) by the name mental prayer. In actual practice, the word "meditation" is quite often used as if it meant exactly the same thing as "mental prayer." But if we look at the precise meaning of the word, we find that meditation is only a small part of the whole complex of interior activities which go to make up mental prayer. Meditation is the name given to the earlier part of the process, the part in which our heart and mind exercise themselves in a series of interior activities which prepare us for union with God.
When thought is without affective intention, when it begins and ends in the intelligence, it does not lead to prayer, to love or to communion. Therefore it does not fall into the proper pattern of mental prayer. Such thought is not really meditation. It is outside the sphere of religion and of prayer. It is therefore excluded from our consideration here. It has nothing to do with our subject. We need only remark that a person would be wasting his time if he thought reasoning alone could satisfy the need of his soul for spiritual meditation. Meditation is not merely a matter of "thinking things out," even if that leads to a good ethical resolution. Meditation is more than mere practical thinking.
The distinctive characteristic of religious meditation is that it is a search for truth which springs from love and which seeks to possess the truth not only by knowledge but also by love. It is, therefore, an intellectual activity which is inseparable from an intense consecration of spirit and application of the will. The presence of love in our meditation intensifies and clarifies our thought by giving it a deeply affective quality. Our meditation becomes charged with a loving appreciation of the value hidden in the supreme truth which the intelligence is seeking. This affective drive of the will, seeking the truth as the soul's highest good, raises the soul above the level of speculation and makes our quest for truth a prayer full of reverential love and adoration striving to pierce the dark cloud which stands between us and the throne of God. We beat against this cloud with supplication, we lament our poverty, our helplessness, we adore the mercy of God and His supreme perfections, we dedicate ourselves entirely to His worship.
Mental prayer is therefore something like a skyrocket. Kindled by a spark of divine love, the soul streaks heavenward in an act of intelligence as clear and direct as the rocket's trail of fire. Grace has released all the deepest energies of our spirit and assists us to climb to new and unsuspected heights. Nevertheless, our own faculties soon reach their limit. The intelligence can climb no higher into the sky. There is a point where the mind bows down its fiery trajectory as if to acknowledge its limitations and proclaim the infinite supremacy of the unattainable God.
But it is here that our "meditation" reaches its climax. Love again takes the initiative and the rocket "explodes" in a burst of sacrificial praise. Thus love flings out a hundred burning stars, acts of all kinds, expressing everything that is best in man's spirit, and the soul spends itself in drifting fires that glorify the Name of God while they fall earthward and die away in the night wind!
That is why St. Albert the Great, the master who gave St. Thomas Aquinas his theological formation at Paris and Cologne, contrasts the contemplation of the philosopher and the contemplation of the saints:
The contemplation of philosophers seeks nothing but the perfection of the one contemplating and it goes no further than the intellect. But the contemplation of the saints is fired by the love of the one contemplated: that is, God. Therefore it does not terminate in an act of the intelligence but passes over into the will by love.
St. Thomas Aquinas, his disciple, remarks tersely that for this very reason the contemplative's knowledge of God is arrived at, on this earth, by the light of burning love:
The contemplation of "philosophers," which is merely intellectual speculation on the divine nature as it is reflected in creatures, would be therefore like a skyrocket that soared into the sky but never went off. The beauty of the rocket is in its "death," and the beauty of mental prayer and of mystical contemplation is in the soul's abandonment and total surrender of itself in an outburst of praise in which it spends itself entirely to bear witness to the transcendent goodness of the infinite God. The rest is silence.
Let us never forget that the fruitful silence in which words lose their power and concepts escape our grasp is perhaps the perfection of meditation. We need not fear and become restless when we are no longer able to "make acts." Rather we should rejoice and rest in the luminous darkness of faith. This "resting" is a higher way of prayer.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments on Circa 1975 are moderated.