Contemplative Prayer: A New Framework

CONTEMPLATIVE

PRAYER

A New Framework

DOM DAVID FOSTER

Wendy Robinson (1934–2013)

CONTENTS

Introduction

1 Religious Experience

2 A Traditional Framework

3 New Starting Points

4 Contemplative Experience

5 Knowing and Unknowing

6 Being and Beyond

7 Prayer of Love and Silence

Conclusion

References

Index

Introduction

God dropped out of my life one night in Oxford, as I was on my way to visit friends. It was my first term and I was desperately lonely. It was my first time away from home, and I had not faced up to how difficult, how disorientating, it was. And God was not there either. In the bitter cold, a gap yawned. A bit of solid ground I had counted on just crumbled away.

It left me terribly shocked. Explaining it away (as my friends tried to do, and it really was nothing as exceptional as all that) just missed the point. What had gripped me, for the first time, was that I could feel as lonely as that, without God; and, paradoxically, for all his not being there, that I could never have felt so utterly sure of God’s reality – the immediacy of absence bore in. It felt like a paralysis of faith. Nothing it had given me to understand up to then bore any relation to the way I found myself that evening as I crossed Parks Road. To re-engage with God became the only thing that mattered.

Paradoxically, I knew I had to pray, and that I had to learn a whole new way of praying, where I could find God in a completely different way. I knew I had to start with that emptiness and let the sense of alienation become less disorientating, to stop still, slowly to find my way around again in the dark. It got me into contemplative prayer, and into monastic life and everything else that has followed. There have been times when it has all made some kind of sense; there have been others too, less startling than the first, back in the difficult terrain where the whole enterprise just seems absurd at best, but where there seems to be no more intelligent choice than to be patient with the sense of estrangement. It is simply, I realize, always as if for the first time. This is what the life of faith is like.

There are practical books on prayer that talk about all this. I want to explore what is involved from a more philosophical point of view. It is the question that I was asking myself back then: how can I be so sure of the immediacy of God when what I am aware of is his absence? Contemplative prayer is how we explore this question. So this book is a philosophical approach to contemplative prayer: what it is and how it is what it is.

The Christian tradition has a great deal to contribute to this, and when I first considered this book I thought it would be enough to reassert the landmarks of this tradition. However, as I began to appreciate the scale of the challenge of modern philosophy to the premises of the earlier tradition, which often focus on Platonism or Descartes, I realized that the philosophical approach I was looking for needed to address a range of fundamental questions. In fact, it would be worth exploring a new approach in order to try to reconnect the tradition of prayer with which I was familiar to more recent philosophy of religion. I was concerned that modern discussions about this tradition were dealing with something different from what I understood as contemplative prayer, but that did not seem to feature much in academic discourse. A telling hiatus. There are plenty of books on Christian mysticism, of course, many dealing with things from a historical point of view; but, as works of ‘spirituality’, they did not seem to address the questions I had been asking in trying to make sense of the contemplative dimension of faith.

Dom Illtyd Trethowan, a monk of Downside, used to teach that God was implicit in all our awareness. The problem is to say how. Illtyd argued strongly that our knowledge of God is not a matter of propositional reasoning on the basis of empirical experience, and the psychological categories William James used to talk about Christian mysticism also missed the point because they were essentially just about subjective states. Illtyd believed that recognizing God’s presence was a matter of waking up to what it meant for a human being to be intelligently aware of things, and he was content with a broadly Platonist or Augustinian approach to explaining that.

That is the framework that has, broadly speaking, supported the Christian mystical tradition, and I do not want to reject it in this book. However, I do not think it is as accessible now as it was in the past; for a different starting point, I found myself thinking back to what was going on when prayer seemed actually to be grinding to a halt, when I was aware of almost anything but the presence of God! This made me try to rethink what was going on in the experience of prayer, as it were, without bringing God into it. The idea was, therefore, to try to think through how God does come into experience, when, of course, there is nothing in empirical terms to show for it.

The paradoxical idea of leaving God out of the experience of prayer is the kind of ‘bracketing’ that is characteristic of Husserl’s method in phenomenology. It means trying to describe experience from the subject’s point of view (as a phenomenon), without any preconceptions about how whatever it might be can be the object of a person’s experience. The phenomenologist’s concern for experience, then, is not for its subjectivity in a psychological sense, but for the way reality engages us, recognizing too that it does so in more than just cognitive or propositional terms, but through our whole way of being in the world.

Contemplative prayer is concerned with God as, in some way, the ultimate reality or, in some way, at reality’s heart. And there are plenty of explanations about that, on both sides of the question whether or not he even exists. It is striking how a person who prays can somehow remain undisturbed by all the argument; even if the questions are live ones, prayer somehow works in a different way, on a different level. It engages with reality – whatever its explanation – in a different way. What it engages with, together with how that manifests itself to a person in prayer, is strange and sometimes deeply disturbing; it is also a source of fascination, sometimes of pleasure and delight. From the phenomenological point of view, it is complicated by the way the faith of the person who prays conditions the subjectivity that engages in experience, and, obviously, by the way in which the account is trying to describe a reality that is known by contrast with everything else.

This is an additional reason for my interest in the modern sense of disorientation, of loss, including the loss of meaning and of purpose – of being left hanging in the air (and in the dark): they can be places where people discover a ‘call to prayer’, whether or not they have the rooting in Christian practice to help them make sense of it in those terms. Some of these concerns are also represented by various styles of nihilism. I found nihilism spoke to my own sense of hollowness as well as pointing rather well at the hollowness it is possible to feel about religion. But this experience of doubt and bewilderment has a potentially religious value as a call to human growth. This bewildering place is a place of prayer. Contemplative prayer can be a way into faith; it is certainly how it grows, and how it teaches us to live forwards into hope.

The approach I outline in this book is an attempt to describe, in the experience of prayer, how God comes in. As such it has a phenomenological side to it. But I also try to reflect on the philosophical implications of that kind of account. The phenomenological side of the discussion focuses on the paradoxical experience of being drawn into something that seems empty, where we find ourselves addressed, but by a blank that, nevertheless, seems to be the essential and ultimate thing. Trying to understand that philosophically raises metaphysical and epistemological questions. Ultimately I try to bring together what I call a traditional approach and one I describe in relation to the concerns of more recent philosophical work. Although I am not convinced by the more sceptical forms of postmodernism, its critique of modernity opens up a field where the earlier traditions of Christian thought and experience can be explored in new ways. This book cannot do much more than dip the toe in these rather deep waters, but I hope it will help the reader towards an understanding of what contemplative prayer involves and of its deep roots in human intelligence and human being.

This book is very different from the one Dom Illtyd might have written; he would probably disagree with it. However, I hope it will point to at least one way in which the Christian contemplative tradition can be approached by anyone who takes a philosophical interest in the Christian faith. I would certainly like to build some bridges to help people understand the wisdom of the Christian mystical tradition, which I do not think has always been well served by modern philosophy.

It is impossible to do this without seeing contemplative prayer as the attempt to open up a space in the heart and mind big enough for Jesus to become the central figure who helps make sense of everything. This is where the practice of prayer reaches beyond an attempt to understand experience and the various philosophical ramifications of that; at this point, what engages me with Jesus is the fullness of his divine mystery that reaches out and draws everything to himself.

I would like to thank everyone who has, wittingly or unwittingly, been so generous in helping this book reach publication. I owe particular thanks to the Dominican Priory in Cambridge where I was able to begin the serious reading and study that helped me think out the material for this book. I am indebted to the Rev Professor Sarah Coakley for the encouragement and stimulus she gave me while I was there as well as subsequently. If Dom Illtyd has been a protagonist, I must also mention Fr Fergus Kerr, OP, one of those who taught me in the Dominican Studium in Oxford in the early 1980s. He was no antagonist, but his dialogue at that time with Fr Illtyd about experience gave me my first acquaintance with Heidegger and with Wittgenstein’s potential contribution to the philosophy of religion. I can hardly say how grateful I am for that. Others who, in various ways, have been sources of instruction and encouragement, to whom I owe my special thanks, include Jakob Deibl, OSB, Alison Fincham, Katharine Hall, Hayo Krombach, Andrew Louth and Hugh Walters. Similarly, I owe to the Prior of Sant’Anselmo, Fr Elias Lorenzo, OSB, the opportunity to come to Rome where I have been able to complete the research and writing of the book.

The truth is that coming to Rome has opened up a whole new area of research that would require a very different book to be written, and I am conscious of the delays that circumstances have put in the way of completing even what turns out to be this coup d’essai. I am all the more grateful, then, to Robin Baird-Smith and to Bloomsbury for their patience and attention to the preparations of the text for publication. But the person who, above all, helped me during the time of this book’s gestation, as interlocutor, guide and Platonic Diotima, who most of all wanted to see the book but who no longer needs it, is Wendy Robinson, to whom I gratefully dedicate it.

1

Religious Experience

Prayer is not about cultivating certain states of consciousness, even though there do seem to be characteristic features when people talk about their experience of prayer. Prayer is about God. But the oddity of what a person is doing (or not doing), especially in contemplative prayer, invites attention to what is going on (or is not going on). Even though the experience of praying is not what makes it prayer, the questions deserve an answer: what is going on? How does it make sense? It is also clear that prayer, and especially perseverance in contemplative prayer, calls for mental discipline, moral virtue and attention, if only because it goes against the grain of so much of our habits and training, not to mention our impulsiveness and reactivity. This will need to be considered later on. At the outset of this book, though, I want to pay some attention to the notion of experience and to clarify a way of talking about it in relation to contemplative prayer in a way that is true to my understanding of the mainstream Christian tradition.¹

In accounts of mystics we sometimes find extraordinary states described; there is a common tradition that these should not be taken out of proportion, and that even a certain degree of scepticism is healthy – having the experience is not the point. The more common experience of prayer is different. People often talk of dryness and darkness, of frustration, of the sense of its being a waste of time, while at the same time knowing – in a way that begs many questions even from the person at prayer – that they could not live as deeply or as truly without it. Dom John Chapman (1865–1933), whose posthumously published Spiritual Letters are a remarkable testimony to this kind of experience and to how to persevere in it, seems to relish the paradoxes here.² His famous phrases about a certain kind of experience of prayer include ‘meanwhile the mind is concentrated on nothing in particular – which is God of course’; ‘an act of attention to God is an act of inattention to everything else’; ‘the intellect faces a blank and the will follows it’. Chapman is talking about the paradox between how it ‘feels’ (a blank), which is all the intellect can do with the experience, and how we act, the commitment we make to it (the will following it).

It is easy to overlook that, for the paradox to work, the conflict in feeling Chapman describes registers a kind of ecstatic pull: the person praying is being drawn into unknown territory where God discloses himself. Chapman eschews erotic language in talking about prayer, but the erotic imagery and ecstatic experiences of some mystics at prayer do not belong to a completely different universe of meaning.³ To this we must return at the end of this book.

Religious experience in the philosophy of religion

‘Experience’ is a slippery term and a number of approaches seem to me to amount to false starts. The danger is always that the experience becomes an end in itself, something that has its own significance. Having a certain kind of experience can even confer a certain status (being a ‘contemplative’ or a ‘mystic’) over the have-nots. The danger lies in thinking that you can isolate an experience either from what it is an experience of (its object), or from whose experience it is (its subject), and treat it as a kind of object in its own right as a quasi sense-datum for empirical analysis and evaluation.

Interest in religious experience in the modern philosophy of religion has often been connected with the search for arguments for the existence of God, and the empiricist frame of this interest means that much of the discussion has been based on just such a notion of experience.⁴ William James is usually referred to as an example of this approach, and the research associated with Alister Hardy and David Hay into reports of religious experience shows continuing interest in this kind of work.⁵ But as a basis for an argument about the existence of God, it is not at all clear how conclusive such an approach to religious experience can be.⁶ A particular difficulty would be the logical step needed to identify a particular phenomenological content with God. Even if the notion of an ‘ineffable experience’ could be clarified, for instance, it is not thereby an experience of an ineffable being, even if that is a just characterization of God. Once it is agreed that God is not an object of perception, it is very hard for an experience-report to be accepted