CONTEMPLATION AND COSMOLOGY

Batchawana Bay

Tim Lilburn


A mile out in the gigantic lake, far past bay mouth, ice ends in tall turquoise dunes against which the surf piles and builds, piles and builds. Fox move on the white river at night. Twelve feet of snow have fallen in the dark and pale trees this winter; you go nowhere without snowshoes once off the ploughed road. Look, look well – the astounding particularity of things entices the careful love-attention of contemplation. This is the theoria physike of the early desert monks, Anthony, Evagrius, others. Contemplation is inquiry into the nature of being; it is not amelioration practised by the credulous, not a shirking of the adult task of intentional activity. It is silence in response to the utterly human exigent vocation: understand the world. 

But how understand? Contemplation's attention-in-silence knows by standing alongside, craning toward, dwelling with. Its knowing is poor: it doesn't draw back from its subject bearing the extracted wealth of an essence, a meaning, a moral. Contemplation is the moment when human knowing, lured by the possibility of perfect understanding, is thwarted, shamed, bent back on itself, but continues to know through this shame. Contemplation is knowledge impoverished and embarrassed but that keeps going. This knowing in the midst of the embarrassment of knowledge topples into adoration. Adoration has the completeness for contemplation that judgement has for rational inquiry. Contemplation, unlike the more entrepreneurial noesis of analytic reason, is not interested in the power of knowledge over the thing known, not interested in converting it to utility: marvelling is exactly enough. 

Contemplation is a stance, a holding oneself in visual and mental readiness before the world which is not a mirror, not a problem, an adversary, friend, playground, not 'raw stuff', not symbol, not a balm, not a terror. The contemplative must be disciplinedly poor: you must stand before your subject, attention straining, convinced you know nothing. You do not presume to name, define; the task is simply to look in 'perfect' puzzlement at the birch branch, the river, the stone, the lake, to dwell in each with alert unknowing. Contemplation is the desire for something finer than the pleasure of regarding one's imagination caught in the act of naming. It is the taste for ecstasy of reverence, the mind feeling all names fumble from it, the feel of the truth of that. 

Contemplation's vector is transcendental yet it bends as well into the world. There its subject is individualities, thisnesses. Contemplation knows the world as a spectacle of difference in which each thing is nothing other than its inscrutable self. It attends to things so finely themselves they fall beneath order, law. Look out the window: a birch tree, a frozen river mouth behind the slowly rotting ice pack of the bay, green-brown cliffs of an old mountain range. Look closely at the birch, a branch halfway up it. The branch gropes toward you like an intuition reaching impossibly toward clarity. What is the music-like chaos in the twigs of this birch branch in winter? Here is a stupendous manyness of shape, angle, colour – grey, black, plum, brown, ivory. You can stumble and stare all morning at this branch. What is the order here, the sense, intelligibility: how to think about this branch? What is it like? How come to rest with this branch, its antlering muchness? The questions gradually become less insistent, less outraged. Knowing is still thwarted, still stumbling and staring, but now you have an inkling of the shapeliness of your incomprehension. Stay with it and the carefully attentive befuddlement unravels into a fidelity to the branch, a setting down of stakes, an alongside-ness, a fretful proximity to the branch that is as far as it can be known. The frustration of knowing the whatness of the branch while you persist in singleminded, full-bodied attention to it is the contemplative knowing of this particular branch. 

Contemplation is gazing at the birch tree, or the river, or the lake with a muddled heart and an insistent noetic desire: understand the world. The further you press this desire in silence, the darker your intellect becomes. Contemplations knowing is unknowing. Its understanding is apophatic. Apophasis for the early monk-theologians of the Christian West was the highest understanding, the only true way to comprehend what in the world awoke human awe. The word 'apophasis' suggests denial, a noughting of self, intellect and language that occurs when these, impelled by yearning, press to achieve their fullest expression, the darkness into which they ultimately flower. Such desire-filled unknowing, for the earliest Western contemplatives, was the route to the most intimate cosmology. The apophatic knowledge of the contemplative is the essence of the via negativa; for later writers like Gregory of Nyssa, pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor, it was the core of the 'dark' mystical path to a relationship with the heart of the universe. The deepest truth in all things is numinous, the apophatic writers said, beyond reason, beyond language. It is not exactly true to say that the source of life is good, for that power that vitalises and informs all things is goodness beyond goodness, supra-goodness, they said. And even if the mind could grasp what this superlative quality seemingly was, they believed, it would be lured eventually to cancel this notion as caricature. Knowing in the apophatic tradition is an attentive, name-cancelling darkness of mind, a darkness dazzling with noetic passion. The language of this tradition typically describes the soul's approach to God; it can be used, I believe, too, to plot the return of consciousness to the world, unnameable in its athletic variety. 

Apophatic knowledge is not quietism, an emptying of mind. It is a naming of things beyond names, a naming which continuously overwhelms itself in a headlong appetite for the object, a desire-filled inquiry rushing past its momentary certainties into wonder. The birch branch is an intuition meandering endlessly toward a clear idea. No, it is music: fifty violin concerti locked in gangling wood, a chasm-like spark-gap from the ear. It echoes the profusion of stars. No, it is like the complication, the odd-angledness of bird song. Silence – the gaze going on, a probing. Apophasis is a naming which unnames itself: approximates then overcomes the guess while still retaining it because the truth lies through language in language's brokenness. None of the names is as true as the rhythm of naming then cancelling the name in quest of a further aptness that woos the mind with even more insistence. 

All this leads to wonder, but a wonder that is plucked, worried by distraction. This is a maintaining of the contemplative look, its self-effacement, leaping energy, no matter the temptation to desert it, including the temptation to abandon the whole task because it seems so un-wonder-like. Wonder is an ascesis, a discipline chosen, an election not a grace: I stand this way before the world naming, name denying, attending, intending in love – a noesis that senses in its imperfection the possibility of perfection. Wonder is not thrilling, not enlightenment, not a flash, not a marvellous evacuation of images from the mind, not a confident feeling of oneness with the branch, the river, the green mountains. It is more homely, ragged, less ravished, exigent, capable of devotion. It is a style of holding oneself before the world resulting from an apprehension that the world cannot be known otherwise, cannot be known unless one lays down the task of knowing it while retaining the desire to know it. 

All contemplation becomes apophatic as it deepens. All of it names then sublates the name, glimpsing dimly that the truest knowing of the subject – God or this particular birch branch – lies in the desire to be in constant and unfailingly imperfect quest of it. All contemplation is a knowing which is an unknowing, a darkness in mind caused by an excess of light in the object, a superlative attractiveness, a beckoning energy, complex individuality. Contemplative knowing does not seek the same epistemological mastery as reason, does not imagine that a thing known is one that rests easily in the palm of the mind, caught in description, known in its rough similarity to other things. Contemplation lets fall names, eschews power, to clear the ground for astonishment; it revels in eccentricity. It does not wish to subdue the world but to dwell in it. Apophatic knowledge thus chastens itself in order to complete itself, stilling the impulse for noetic facility to achieve the far more attractive quality of an interior courtesy toward being. Contemplative courtesy is not mere respect for the natural world. Strength, ardour, gentleness, deference, magnanimity – the courteous silence of contemplation allows the mind to dwell with a graceful fretting in the world. The end of contemplation is not dominance or circumscription, but affective domesticity: the birch branch is not an item of knowledge but where I love, where my look rests in insistent and adoring incomprehension. I do not define the branch; it defines me by giving me a home. Knowledge is the generosity of being to the homeless mind. 

Contemplation, apophasis, is a resting in the attractive idiosyncrasy of this river, this mountain, a homecoming to what is. But this rest is not static, stable or placid, is not a condition of epistemological privilege achieved by the earlier negations of language and elevated from contemplation's apophatic linguistic restlessness. Rather, it is a giving up before the variety of things, a thinning of self, a self-quelling that appears now and then in the midst of language's efforts to bespeak the unutterable singularity of things, an exhaustion in the company of this singularity. It is a desire-filled silence that is this speech continued. It resolves itself into an affection for the tree, the stone, a bedding down with them, a sense that their particularity is what gives one gravity and place in the world. 

While contemplation involves the erasure of clear images and names and leans toward a thinking without images, a speech of silence, it nurses no cosy preference for obscurity. All knowing darkens as it builds. One presses against one's incomprehension with a seamless desire to know the subject in utter completeness. Beat constantly with a naked intent upon the cloud of your unknowing. Indeed, contemplation is a recovery of the full eros to know being clearly in all its specificity, to know the world as itself, unqualified by language, unedited by consciousness, to know it as it would be known by a perfect intellect. Such knowledge, at the moment, lies in silence, an attentive, name-asserting, name-cancelling silence. Here knowledge is love; knowledge is desire, the eros to know fully which is the eros for marriage to the world. You hold your self mentally on the balls of your feet before the branch, the stone, caught by the beauty of the thing's difference, desiring its fullest comprehension, a union of self and branch, yet aware that your desire to know it in its full particularity will always be frustrated. Contemplation is the mind humbled and sharpened, made keen for love. 

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Apophatic teachers link the highest contemplative knowledge with virtue, the fruit of ascetical practice. Contemplation refuses any bifurcation of life and knowing. Approximation of virtue in one's approach to the world is a precondition of accurate knowledge; without it: fantasy, projection, the 'cooking' of the subject to please preconception. A certain purity of heart grounds the noetic courtesy of contemplation. 

This 'abundance of virtue' is achieved by 'laborious industry', said Maximus the Confessor. The ornate silence of contemplation rests in a disciplining of self, a channelling of eros. Let persons eager for contemplative knowledge brighten by virtue of the ascetical force of the soul, let them put their affections in school, shape them toward the possibility of awe. 'Finally through the altar of the mind' the contemplative 'summons the silence abounding in song in the innermost recesses of the unseen and unknown utterance of the divinity by another silence rich in speech and tone' (The Church's Mystagogy, 4). 

Maximus is speaking of a 'way', a mode of holding oneself before what one would approach that precedes and accompanies a contemplative bedding down in the cosmos. Every mystical tradition advocates some program of self-discipline: only the pure see. This must not be confused with the self-mutilation of rectitude; it has nothing to do with a horror of flesh and feeling. Rather it is a schooling of eros leading to its unlimited enhancement. The 'way' is hermeneutic: a means of comprehending what is incomprehensible, other – the chaos of colour and angle that is the winter branch, the perfect oddness of this particular stone half-covered in exactly this manner with fresh snow. 

I saw an ikon once of a male figure in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. The cheeks were ravined by tears; the whole face – even the skin and bones seemed absorbed in the look – took in some large sadness: the world? The loneliness of human life outside Paradise? The mourning of the face was exquisite, as graceful an epiphany of human nature as music. Here is the point of asceticism: you gather yourself in, amassing a density of attention, in order to bring your eros to what can evoke its length and breadth, depth and height: sorrow for the world, ravishment by the world, attention to splendour, attention to horror. The abnegation of the 'way' is a stilling of other itches (for distraction, for approbation, for security) which deflect attention from the worthy enormities presented to mind, dwindle fundamental human eros to comfort. 

The contemplation of birch branches and stones, the adoring look that freights the beholder to the world, the noetic stance of courtesy toward being, claims an ascetical practice. It requires a cognitive humility, a deference to the significance of being, a mortification of the intellect's will to power. You cannot truly see this stone if you believe the world is yours to do with as you will. Interiorly speaking, you must lay no violent hands upon it. Eros must be freed from the belittling impulse to convert the world into something useful or consoling and be brought to expend itself in its true delight: the contemplative look. 

Cognitive humility entails a fasting of the intellect. You subdue the need for intellectual clarity and the security this brings, and take nourishment instead from the belief that the mere desire to know a thing in its vast thisness is to know it. 'This truly is the vision of God: never to be satisfied in the desire to see him', observes Gregory of Nyssa. Contemplation of the branch means letting it be nothing other than what it really is, unqualified by intellect, almost eerie in its complete otherness. In contemplation, marvelling and questing to know is knowing. 

Contemplation can require a disciplining of desires for closeness with the world. Mute the urge to achieve a bogus proximity to the world by remodelling it so it gains an easy welcome in the house of consciousness. The wilderness is not loved in the theme motel whose sign on the edge of the busy highway shows two smiling bears in neckties and fedoras. Leave the world solitary in its difference. Assume only a self-effacing intimacy with it, so that the closer you press toward the stone the more its unlikeness to you is underscored. 

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Contemplation rides an exigent wave of desire outward: understand the world. It is an exercise in ecstasy; it is an insistent gazing that bucks you from yourself into the world which then returns you to yourself, healed, restless, bereft. That's how contemplation understands, but what does it understand? What does attention-in-silence tell us about the real? How do its hints, glimmerings, contribute to cosmology? 

Extreme variety is being's most alluring, wonderwakening trait, an apparently limitless play of density, colour, grain, angle and thus it, more than anything, beckons the adoring look. Contemplation's subject, when it turns to the world, is the thisness, the uniqueness, the flamboyance of individual things. It tells us that the world in its immense specificity is unknowable but loveable: that it can be known only apophatically by the mind naming then reversing its names until it edges toward muted, protean regard. Contemplation further tells us that the cosmos can accommodate the most audacious human desire, the desire for the oneness of all things, that it is not hostile to a nostalgia for Paradise. It tells us that the splendour of being's difference quickens awe. It tells us that the world links itself to us through our awe, our awe the root system of being, sunk in the noosphere. It tells us that the truth of limitless particularity lies beneath language, but is accessible to language when language asserts then cancels itself, asserts, cancels. For in the restlessness of these reversals is the eros of the language-user to return home to his place among stones, river, maples. Contemplation tells us that the truth of the world is that it is a home for us, is the place-that-gives-a-home-to-the-eros-impelled-mind. It tells us that being, at least in part, is ecstatic: the contemplative is in the world by always travelling out of himself. 

Contemplation's observations on cosmology are shy of clarity, of precise definition: they come with the loss of the desire to still the world in thought even as the mind continues to crane forward, toppling. Its knowledge of the world is like the slowly accreting 'blood knowledge' by which the immigrant comes to feel at home in, be fed by, a new geography, a new culture. It is not quantifiable, teachable, marketable, cannot be commanded, but is indispensable: it is the learning of a relationship that nourishes, makes life possible. It is like the knowledge of acquiring a taste. The cosmology of contemplation is a gradually growing familiarity; its deepest truth is a feeling-at-homeness, a grateful silence. It is a loving, a dwelling in, a resting, a being defined by a place, a branch, a river, a stone, a mountain, a lake.