What is Contemplation?: An Interview With Eleanor Johnson

Conducted by James MacNee, a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Virginia and a Graduate Research Associate at the Journal of Contemplative Studies.

JCS: So, the first question in this series is: for you, what is contemplation?

EJ: That’s a great question. And to state the obvious first, different people would define contemplation in different ways. That’s true now, that’s been true forever. Generally speaking, the way I think about contemplation is that it’s a practice of mind and affect, the goal of which is to get your mind and affect to slow down enough to perceive either the presence of God or your own experience of connection with God—or something about the way that the divine works or moves in the world.

Augustine, in the Confessions, talks about getting the mind and heart to hold still. And him describing contemplation in this way is very important in the history of contemplation and in the history of how people think about contemplation when they write works of, or studies about it. So, I think it’s partially about getting your mind and heart to slow down and take a pause. That can come in the form of meditation, where your mind is consciously directing the process of slowing down, or it can come in the form of something closer to witnessing, when you look at a thing and allow that thing to perhaps not take over but suffuse your consciousness in a way that allows for a contemplative slow down.

It’s a practice of mind and affect, the goal of which is to get your mind and affect to slow down enough to perceive either the presence of God… or something about the way that the divine works or moves in the world.

JCS: That’s great. I do wonder, just as a follow up, because I know you’re rooted not just in the Western tradition but specifically how these sorts of things occur in the English language, what do you think of the effort or movement to use the term, contemplation, as an English word to group together all of these concepts from non-English traditions and practices. Do you think that’s appropriate? Do you think it’s okay to bring it out of its context and use the similarity between certain practices to do so?

EJ: Well two things. First of all, that’s really a question about how I view comparatism largely, and I view it well. I mostly do work on Western European things myself because of my training and the languages that I know. But I think that when we look at large traditions of a particular phenomenon like contemplation, we can either look at them in a deep historical way within one or closely related locations, or we can look at them horizontally across many different locations. The questions that you can ask depending on how you approach them are different, and the answers you get are different. And I think that doing comparative work is really, really, really important for many reasons, one of which is to help excavate and surface whatever ongoing critical biases and presumptions there are about any of the areas in which you’re focusing your attention.

So, looking at contemplative literature in England and France in the Middle Ages, you’re going to see a somewhat limited number of really striking differences because there’s so much cultural pour-over between those two areas in that time period. If you look at regions that are much farther apart geographically or much farther apart historically, you start to see some frictions emerge that can say a lot about whatever your own home field study area actually is, and I think that’s extremely valuable.

JCS: That’s great, thank you so much. The next question on our list is: how is contemplation relevant to your research?

EJ: Oh man. Well in a lot of ways. My second book is really squarely about contemplation, and part of the reason I wrote it was something that I started to realize from my pedagogy—almost all of my good research questions ultimately have originated in my teaching. I was teaching a class, in England, on English medieval devotional prose poetry and drama. I started teaching the class because I thought to myself, there’s something going on with 14th century devotional prose and drama. They’re talking to each other more than the scholarship at that time would lead you to believe. And I decided that I was going to teach a class on it and figure out what’s going on. And so, I taught this class, and the resonances across the genres were huge and became clearer and clearer over the course of teaching the class. I came to understand the contemplative, not just as a descriptive category, but really almost as a genre category that subtends prose poetry and drama in England in the 14th and into the 15th century. 

There’s a lot of brilliant scholarship in my field on vernacular theology and a lot of scholarship on mysticism. And those two labels are interpretively useful in a lot of different contexts, but they’re not generally what the authors themselves say about their own texts. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing doesn’t say, “Hi I’m now going to write a work of vernacular theology.” He does say that he’s writing a work about contemplation, and that’s true for a lot of different authors. Contemplation is a term that they used then to describe and characterize what they thought they were doing and what they were after. That term comes up not only in prose but also in poetry and in drama. For me, contemplative and contemplation were useful terms to draw together these ostensibly very formally different works and to say that they’re having a deliberate and self-conscious conversation with each other because they understand themselves as texts about contemplation.

That’s not the only way that it comes up for me, though, in my research—or my teaching for that matter. I also do a lot of work on 21st century avant-garde poetry, and contemplation is actually a very, very powerful interpretive lens to look at contemporary poetry with. And indeed, I teach a class that compares 14th century literature with 21st century poetry, and contemplation is one of the ways I make a bridge between those two very disparate time periods. And to get back to your question about comparatism, I am a huge fan of doing transhistorical comparative studies, and I think it can produce really interesting things. And so, when I write about contemporary and, notionally, very secular, avant-garde American, mostly feminist, poetry, I like thinking about contemplation and using contemplation as a category because it seems to capture a category of thought and practice and a poetic phenomenology that really matters to those poets. They don’t all use the term, but that dynamic is in there, this sense of getting the mind and the heart to slow down and engage with something in a deep and sustained way. So, contemplation has been very, very important across my work, not only in my research but also my teaching.

JCS: That’s wonderful. I love that. Contemplation as not just a subject matter, but as a sort of interface for engaging people across genres or across history. That’s really lovely. So, the third question is: what excites you about the future directions in the study of contemplation?

EJ: Oh my gosh, so many things. One of the chief ones is about social media. I carry around a very large quantity of anxiety about social media, as I think many of us do. And one of the things I worry about is the fact that social media basically operates on teeny tiny little itsy-bitsy fragments. It’s about speed and rapidity, and frankly, it’s about the disconnectedness of one comment from the prior one or the next one. It’s not about continuity; it’s not about sustaining attention. And I think that contemplation, as a habit of mind, is very good, right? It’s good for thought, it’s good for philosophy, and it’s good for a person themselves. And thinking contemplatively and thinking about Contemplative Studies is an interesting kind of riposte to the massive fragmentation and energy dispersal that’s going on broadly in culture right now throughout most of the world with the rise of social media and things like that. Contemplation is a practice of making your mind slow down. You slow down and really dwell. And I think dwelling is really central to what contemplation is about: you’re dwelling in a particular moment or state of understanding or thought or feeling or whatever about the divine or about the relationship of the self to the divine. That’s an important way of resisting this constant energy dispersal and fragmentation that I think is going on in our public culture.

When I teach my students, I love teaching poetry both medieval and contemporary, in part because you can’t just blast through it. You can’t do a Twitter sized synopsis of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, it’s not possible. You have to read the damn thing, and you have to read it again and again and you have to read it really, really slowly. That produces a certain kind of contemplative state experientially for readers, and I think that’s great. It’s an important form of engaging with the written word, and it’s an important form of engaging with culture. So, the future for Contemplative Studies that I’d like to see is one where we double down on the importance of the contemplative state, not just as a means of doing religious work but actually as a means of being deeply engaged with thought, deeply engaged with culture, and not just skittering over the surface of everything. So that’s something that I am excited about.

It’s a deeply held belief of mine that poetry is a primary tool of contemplation.

JCS: That’s lovely. And I love the focus on reading as a participation in a contemplative act of resistance against some really powerful currents in our social world. So, the final question we have: what are some of your favorite books in Contemplative Studies? And this is Contemplative Studies as broad as you want it to be.

EJ: Oh yes, I will be broad. Augustine’s Confessions is top of the list. Boethius’s On the Consolation of Philosophy is also top of list. For contemporary scholars—God there’s so many—I really like Jessica Brantley’s book Reading in the Wilderness, I think that’s a really great, smart book. Cristina Maria Cervone’s Poetics of the Incarnation is also a great, powerful, and smart book. Honestly though, some of my very favorite books on contemplation are poetry books. I really like Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, which I referenced a moment ago; I really like this poetry book called This Connection of Everyone with Lungs by Juliana Spahr. These are contemporary writers. I really like Myung Mi Kim’s poetry, she wrote a trilogy of poetic books, called Penury, Commons, and Civil Bound. I really, really love those works.

Going back to the Middle Ages for a second, William Langland’s Piers Plowman is my most difficult contemplative text that I really like. Langland is not just trying to do contemplation in that poem but he’s really trying to think about what’s at stake in contemplation in that poem. When I teach Piers Plowman, one of the first things I say to my students is that this is not a poem you’re supposed to like—this is not a poem you’re supposed to get, especially the first go round. This is a poem that wants you to hang out and dwell with it. That’s one of the reasons that the main character is on a quest to find “do well” because dwell is a syncopation of doing well. So, it’s a poem that’s about dwelling and inhabitation and tolerating difficulty, tolerating confusion, tolerating a lack of plot, tolerating the fact that you don’t totally understand what the characters are about. And that kind of cognitive grind is a form of contemplation. And I think Langland is the best in the business at doing that kind of contemplation, because he doesn’t really care if we understand what’s going on. He cares if he can grab us and make us sit still, hold still the heart of man. So those are some contemplative poetry, contemplative writing, scholarship, and contemplative philosophy going back to late antiquity.

I love teaching poetry… you can’t just blast through it. You can’t do a Twitter sized synopsis of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, it’s not possible. You have to read the damn thing, and you have to read it again and again and you have to read it really, really slowly. That produces a certain kind of contemplative state experientially for readers, and I think that’s great.

JCS: That’s awesome. Thank you so much. That was perfect. The emphasis on poetry being a contemplative act is really exciting for me.

EJ: It’s a deeply held belief of mine that poetry is a primary tool of contemplation. And in fact, it’s St. Augustine that I usually go to make that point. Augustine in the Confessions asks, how do we understand time? It’s really hard to understand time. What’s at stake in time? God is in eternity and man is in time. And how are we supposed to square that circle? How can we know that our words are getting to him? And then Augustine says to think of a psalm. Let’s think about how when you’re singing a psalm part of the psalm is in your mind as you sing it. The prior parts of the psalm before that one moment are in your mind also and you know the rest of the psalm before it even gets into your conscious recall. It’s all there and that’s what it is for God to be in eternity. So, he uses a poem as a way of contemplating divine eternity. It’s the only tool he has. Other than that, he’s just like, “Oh this is confusing.” So, Augustine clearly understands poetry as a means of doing contemplative work. Contemplating our experience of temporality is a very important subfield within contemplative writing, and Augustine says to think about a poem, that’s the best way to gain a reflexive understanding of what it is to live beyond time, to exist beyond time.

JCS: Wow. Thank you so much! This has been great.

EJ: Always happy to talk about contemplation and poetry.