Conducted by James MacNee, a doctoral candidate at the University of Virginia and a Research Assistant at the Journal of Contemplative Studies.

JCS: Thank you so much for joining us. Our first question is: What is contemplation?

KH: If only there were a simple answer! Even if we restrict ourselves to the West for the moment, there’s no straightforward or simple answer. Contemplation begins in the Greek-speaking world using the word, theoria, and then gets translated into Latin only somewhat later as contemplatio. Then it changes its significance in many ways. It gets taken up in Christianity more from the Greek and Roman worlds than from the Hebraic world. In Hebrew, we don’t have a rich lexicon of visual apprehension of God, whereas we do in the Greek and Latin worlds. In the Hebrew world, there’s much more emphasis upon hearing God rather than beholding Him. And there’s a great anxiety in that religious culture about beholding God, which is marked heavily and differently throughout the Hebrew Scriptures.

The meaning of “contemplation” is worked out in the early years of the generative centuries of the Catholic tradition. We get rival theories of it even within Christianity. The most important one, perhaps the one that has been most sustained in recent centuries of the tradition, is that of Thomas Aquinas for whom contemplation, after careful preparation, is a simple intuition of the Deity. For him, pursuing a contemplative vocation might last 60 years or more, and you might have one split second of intuition of the Deity—and that moment would justify your entire vocation in a contemplative religious order. Very different in the 12th century, before Aquinas, is Richard of Saint Victor’s idea of contemplation. On his understanding, one can contemplate anything, not just God. You can start by contemplating a blade of grass or an insect’s wing and work your way up to the Trinity. So, they are really very different models.

If only there were a simple answer!

By the time we get to the late 17th century and early 18th century, with the crisis of Quietism, the Church begins to worry about contemplative practices: some practioners might think that it renders the system of sacraments unnecessary. The Church leaned heavily on contemplation, especially in monasteries and especially among female religious. Where does contemplation go? Well, if it’s not allowed in the Church, it’s got to find a home somewhere. It’s just too interesting and too important, too much a part of the human being, to be lost entirely. One place it goes is Philosophy, where we find philosophers thinking about aesthetic contemplation as well as recovering the philosophical contemplation of the ancient Epicurians and Stoics.

You find Kant in the late 18th century paying particular attention to how we contemplate the landscape. Schopenhauer takes this idea and runs with it. In The World as Will and Representation, we get a rich account of aesthetic contemplation as the only relief from the overbearing tedium of life. Schopenhauer has highly pessimistic views about life. He’s an atheist, so there’s no escape from our troubles by having recourse to God in prayer. There’s no escape from causality, we’re just locked into it; and there’s no escape from conventional morality: it’s too powerful a social force to be resisted. The only way we can gain any measure of freedom is through aesthetic contemplation. I contemplate a tree and am refreshed. This idea persists, with changes, through the 20th century. The story I’ve just told pertains only to the West. So there are at least three different modes of contemplation! And of course, in the East, there are many other different ways.

JCS: As a follow up, how do you feel about the word “contemplation” being used as a global category to organize a multiplicity of traditions? You trace very nicely how the word has linguistic roots in Western traditions, but now it’s being used more broadly to account for traditions outside of English and, at best, with only marginal connection to Greek or Latin.

KH: Well, there is a family resemblance, as Wittgenstein would say, with respect to the different uses of “contemplation.” I think the real difficulty that people have, especially outside of the Academy, is trying to harmonize the words “meditation” and “contemplation.” From the Eastern religions, we have inherited the word “meditation” in English, and people think that’s a rather different thing from contemplation, whereas in fact they tend to be quite close in some respects. In the Christian tradition, meditation is practised with images. So, people in Holy Week, just before Easter, may well go to a church and meditate on images of Jesus’s path to the cross. That’s meditation, meditatio. Contemplation, in many ways, is the opposite of that. It is the emptying of the mind of thoughts and images, which is much closer in some ways to certain Eastern practices. But again, here, one can’t draw thick, straight lines because Pure Land Buddhism in Japan, for example, is frequently oriented towards images, such as the meditation on the setting sun. We have to be very careful about the contexts in which we use the two words. During the Quietism crisis, the Church stressed meditation over contemplation.

JCS: And even in the earliest Buddhist sources, the form of the Buddha, in a visual sense, is described as a proper object for meditation. So it seems, at least across these two traditions, the sense modality of vision is very important.

 I think the real difficulty that people have… is trying to harmonize the words “meditation” and “contemplation.”

KH: It’s true. In Christianity, contemplatio is really to do with the passive beholding of the Deity. It’s not looking at Him because there’s nothing to look at, but it’s a matter of seeing in the sense that the verb to see has inherited a sense of the verb to understand: for example, I see, I understand. So, contemplation is linked tightly to understanding or trying to understand, different flavors of the Deity, as Bernard of Clairvaux puts it in one of his sermons (Goodness, Justice, Love, Mercy, and so on). Of course, the Deity is held to be incomprehensible, unable to be understood by anything as finite as a human mind. No amount of contemplation will allow one to encompass God.

JCS: That’s wonderful. Well, we should move on to the next question: How does contemplation come up in or is relevant to your research?

KH: I’m a systematic theologian, and if you’re a systematic theologian, you’re a bit interested in everything to do with Christianity. You have to see how Christianity as a whole hangs together. Contemplation has always interested me because it’s often so misunderstood, particularly in modern times. Most people who go to Christian churches think of prayer as petition and that’s about it. Especially in Protestant America, people think of prayer as something you do in very intense moments of crisis. Whereas, of course, contemplation has to do with seeking a resting point in one’s being; it’s non-verbal, by and large, and it’s a matter of having a tranquil openness to the Deity, of being receptive to God. We rest in God, to be sure, but we also are open to the new horizons he presents to us in contemplation.

I’ve always been interested in trying to restore the balance, in terms of Christian Theology, of prayer in its contemplative and petitionary modes. That means developing a thorough understanding of contemplation. It’s not just beholding God in one’s “holy hour”; it’s also to read deeply, carefully, to be open to the movements of the Holy Spirit and to study with God as the final end of what we do. And so, the sorts of things that you and I do, studying for a good deal of the day, reading a book with care, trying to understand it, perhaps even reading it with a spiritual awareness—all of this counts as contemplation in my tradition.

A few years ago, when I gave the Gifford Lectures at Glasgow University, I wondered, as everyone does who gives them, how on earth to fulfill the terms of the bequest. Lord Gifford required that one must speak about Natural Theology without reference to revelation. Not easy if you’re a theologian! In the end, I decided to give the lectures on contemplation. To give the idea a twist, I tried to think about what contemplative reading would look like in the Academy. You know how it is in the Academy: we read texts very suspiciously. We’re trained to think that texts are trying to hoodwink us; they’re trying to tell us partial truths at best about society and life. And so, we read them thinking there must be some other darker meaning about the nature of capitalism or gender relationships, or whatever, hidden deep down. We train our undergraduates, with some reason, to do this.

Studying for a good deal of the day, reading a book with care, trying to understand it, perhaps even reading it with a spiritual awareness—all of this counts as contemplation in my tradition.

Yet this way of reading has become increasingly narrow and even tiresome in recent years. Outside the academy, people seldom read in that way. One thing I wanted to propose, without quite getting rid of the hermeneutics of suspicion, was to replace it with a hermeneutics of contemplation, which is much broader. When we’re reading a poem, for example, we seldom read it like a theorem or regard it as a disease to be diagnosed; it’s not a problem put before us that we must solve but something with which we live, that gives us more life or another facet of life to ponder. We tend to caress it, looking forward a little way, then looking back or around, trying to understand the significance of a particular line or trope or figure, trying to arrange parts and wholes, all the while remaining open to its unfamiliar horizons, which keep expanding as we read. Often, we pause and are caught up in the poem’s relations with other poems, or with our earlier readings of the same poem. When we look at the poem, we don’t try to look through it to something else. And this is, to my mind, something that could be done, not just with regard to English literature or French literature, but quite generally when we read. It’s an expansion of the activity of reading.

JCS: That’s really great, thank you. These modalities of reading that involve contemplation rather directly have always been of interest to me. Okay, so our third question: What excites you about the future directions of Contemplative Studies?

KH: Yes. It’s a very exciting period because of the kind of transformation or extension that we were just talking about with regard to contemplation into reading, maybe into writing, and maybe into many things we haven’t even thought about yet in Contemplative Pedagogy. Obviously we don’t want to have classes where there’s no assessment at all, no challenges to one’s ideas, just people sitting around thinking about wider horizons. This is obviously not a sound pedagogical aim. Yet we become better critics—of texts, society, and our own ideas—when we have kept our mind open, when we have looked at what’s been put before us from all sorts of perspectives. I’ve noticed the more I’ve practiced teaching that less is more. If you go into a classroom and present a short text or passage of a longer one and give people a lot more space in which to breathe, a lot more air, then there will be not simply discussion as in an exchange of pre-given views but rather a genuine exposure to fresh assumptions and new horizons. I think we need time and space for that, instead of trying to cram our students full of information. I would like to see the undergraduate experience, in particular, as being a transformation, a change in how we think that we carry with us throughout our lives.

JCS: That’s lovely, and I think it reflects how contemplative education might just be good education. That’s just what it is.

KH: Right. I give a lot of talks about this sort of thing to church groups and to adult education groups. People often say that it sounds great but that they don’t have time to practice it. Well, I say, if you don’t have time, I don’t have time. I’m a professor, I co-edit a book series, I write poems, books, and essays; I’m a father, a husband, and a friend; I have many responsibilities. No matter how busy one is, it’s possible to find fifteen or twenty minutes each day, even if it’s at lunchtime. You can sit on a park bench. You can close your office door, if you have an office. You can go to a nearby library. There are many opportunities to be alone for a short period. And the degree of refreshment and reinvigoration of one’s whole being is striking. I use the example of working out at the gym. It takes a little bit of resolve to go to the gym. But if you workout in the gym three times a week, say, over a few weeks, you notice a real difference in how you are. You have more energy, you’re more alert. And the same sort of thing happens with contemplation. And that’s a very minimal description.

JCS: Absolutely, our last question is: What are some of your favorite books in Contemplative Studies or that are about contemplation? And this can be as broad as you’d like it to be.

I would like to see the undergraduate experience, in particular, as being a transformation, a change in how we think that we carry with us throughout our lives.

KH: Sure. I’ve mentioned two people, two of my favorite authors in the Western Christian tradition. First, there’s Aquinas in the second part of the second part of the second part of the Summa Theologiae : the treatise on the active and the contemplative life. That’s full of wise things on the topic. He emphasizes that you can’t leap into contemplation, you have to prepare yourself morally and spiritually. Only then, once you have cultivated love of God and love of neighbor, is one in a position ever to have a simple intuition of God, and it may never happen. However, it’s the tendency toward it that is transformative in the relationship with God.

Aquinas is very measured in what he says. Interestingly, he doesn’t even place contemplation above all other ways of life. The “mixed life” is the best one, he thinks, which is when you contemplate and then teach or preach. The person sequestered in a research unit who never encounters students would not be his preferred model of academic life. It would be people like ourselves who spend much of the day reading, thinking and contemplating, and then we present what we’ve learned to students and to others in our classes and in our books. Contemplation has a social dimension to it; it is something we can all do, even if we have families, friends, and jobs.

The other book that I admire and that is not at all well known is The Ark of Moses by Richard of St. Victor, written in the 12th century. It’s only recently been retranslated, and it’s a very difficult text for people to read at first, because monastic writing at that time revolves around biblical symbols and Neoplatonic thought; one must slowly learn how to read it. Once you get through that initial stage, however, you’ll see that his vision is very beautiful and very open. I think Richard is the first person in the Christian West who says that you can contemplate anything at all, as long as it’s not disgusting: you can’t contemplate a rotting corpse, for example. But you can start with anything alive in nature, and you can move slowly up to the intellectual and spiritual world.

I think there are new possibilities for this mode of contemplation. It squares with the interest we all have today, rightly, on attending to nature and having environmental questions in our minds and hearts. People in America, in particular, often have a Thoreau-esque idea of being spiritual but not religious. If you go for a walk in the Shenandoah National Park, you can contemplate what is seen and thus rise up to higher levels, passing from creation to Creator. That would be for Christians. Yet, as I’ve said, there are other sorts of contemplation: aesthetic and philosophical, among them. No one is excluded from contemplation. My own practice is Catholic, and therefore Trinitarian, but contemplation can be practiced by people of other faiths or no faith.

JCS: That’s wonderful. Though, Buddhists would strongly disagree that you can’t contemplate a rotting corpse!

KH: Oh yes, you’re right!

JCS: In a lot of contexts, that’s one of the most important contemplations.

KH: Right, we have the tradition of memento mori in Christianity. But it’s really interesting that the tradition, by and large, when it comes to contemplation, runs against everything that is disgusting. Contemplation is almost always linked to the passage to God, not our common passage to the grave.

JCS: Fascinating, and when these texts talk about nature being an appropriate object for contemplation, is it specifically referencing the beauty of nature as being worthy of contemplation?

JCS: This comes out of the young Augustine’s dialogue De ordine: it’s the sense of order. In my book, Lands of Likeness, I talk about this. You’re walking in the woods, you stop for a moment, you look at a leaf, and if you contemplate the leaf for more than a second, you’ll see that it’s got a particular shape, an order. And you think, how does this work? And if you think more about it, you’ll think about the way in which the leaves are distributed, and the branches appear along the tree’s truck, and how the seeds get carried away by the wind. If you’ve got any mathematical knowledge, you’ll remember the Fibonacci series from school, and you will start to see that the tree has a wonderful order about it, which is linked to beauty. If you go far enough, then you’ll see it no longer as just a natural object but as a created object, which requires a creator, and so on. We begin from order and end with the Deity.

JCS: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me!

KH: My pleasure! Thank you!