After laxity begun to seep into the Church after Christianity had been made the official religion of the Roman Empire, it was to monasticism that the Church turned for help to renew itself. Although monks, particularly the Irish monks, did a great job to begin with, as the centuries rolled by they fell into decline. This was not so much in their monasteries but in the world where they began to linger for too long away from the spirituality that had formed them. When itinerant monks began to give scandal to others after they had lost their way it, was time for authority to step in.
Charlemagne’s Monastic Reform
Shortly after his coronation as the Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas day in the year 800AD, Charlemagne not only ordered all such monks back to their monasteries but insisted that all monasteries in his Empire should adopt the Benedictine rule. Although the vow of stability ensured there would no longer be bad monks doing harm, it also meant there would no longer be good monks doing good.
This meant that until the mendicant orders came in the thirteenth century, ordinary Catholics lacked the constant spiritual help and support they needed. They were called mendicant orders from the Latin word meaning beggars. Mendicant friars had no time to support themselves, giving all their time to contemplation when they were at home in their priories and friaries, and all their time preaching and teaching when they were away from home. It was for this reason they looked to the laity, to whose spiritual wellbeing they had committed themselves, for financial help.
St Thomas Aquinas to the Rescue
I cannot help thinking that it was a certain amount of jealously on the part of malcontented monks, who looked with some envy on the freedom given to mendicant friars. Some of them complained insisting that the mendicants should return to their friaries and priories to practise contemplation there. It was precisely to answer these criticisms that in defence of the new mendicant orders, the Dominicans, the Franciscans, the Carmelites and the Augustinians, that St Thomas Aquinas uttered his famous retort.
“Our work”, he said “Is to contemplate and then to share the fruits of contemplation with others”. In other words, just as contemplation is the heart and soul of the monastic life, it is likewise the heart and soul of their mendicant life, St Thomas insisted, as it should be for the life of the Church, as it was from the very beginning.
He explained that they were trying to follow in the footsteps of the first apostles, going out into the world to share with others the fruits of their contemplation, which alone would empower them to bring about God’s kingdom in the world. In order to do this outside the spiritual security of their monastic seclusion, they had to give more time to the personal prayer that leads to contemplation inside their priories, friaries and hermitages. As we will see more clearly later, the method of prayer used by a person who has been led into contemplation, is the best possible form of prayer for a person called to live and work in the world, precisely because it is so simple.
The Meaning of Contemplation
The word contemplation is so important that I would now like to give it back its original meaning. In general the word means to gaze in awe at someone or something, but Christian contemplation means to gaze in awe upon the creator of all things, in, and together with Jesus Christ, here and now in his risen glory. The journey upon which we have embarked then is a journey into Christ so that in him, surcharged with the love that is generated by his Sacred heart, our loving is purified by his loving.
It is so purified that the two loves become as one, enabling our heartbeats to synchronise with his heartbeat, rising as one to be embraced, enveloped and then embodied in God. Christian contemplation is human loving raised to a higher supernatural level by being subsumed into the loving of Christ, not just making it possible for us to rise in such a way that our love can enter into God, but for his love to descend and enter into us.
Unlike Christ himself who was at all times able to give and receive perfect love to his Father in unsullied mystical contemplation, our servitude to self prevents us from what our restless hearts wish to do more than anything else. It was for this reason that the first apostles preached Christ and, as St Paul put it, Christ crucified, because in order that we be freed from servitude to self we have to take up our daily cross and follow him, daily dying to self, both inside and outside of prayer.
Christ the perfect Contemplative
By teaching the faithful to meditate on the person of Christ, the first apostles who had known him, were able to see what continual contemplation did for him. It endowed him with the fruits of contemplation, with all the love that generated the infused virtues, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit that enabled them to see in him what God wanted to do in them. To put it another way, the apostles wanted them to see through their meditation, the perfect human being who they would be inspired to emulate. But that was not all.
They wanted the love that would be generated by their meditation to be redirected by the Holy Spirit, from the Christ who once lived in history to the Christ who now lives in Majesty. For the union that is the deepest desire of all lovers, can only take place between two people who are alive and living now.
Mystical Purification
I have already shown how after Pentecost the apostles spent many years in profound contemplative prayer being purified, to be fully reunited with their risen Lord. This purification involved the daily dying to self that would enable them to receive the fruits of contemplation without which they could not have converted the many thousands of people who would become the foundation of the Church.
They in their turn would inspire new converts by the fruits of contemplation that were clearly embodied in them. It was through mystical contemplation and through the fruits of contemplative loving that the greatest mass conversion the world had ever known took place.
The Vocation of the Church
In defining the vocation of the Dominican Order, St Thomas was also defining the vocation of every other Order, and furthermore he was defining the vocation of the Church, not just in ancient times but for all times. That is why perhaps the greatest spiritual theologian of modern times, the Dominican Fr Reginald Garrigue Lagrange in his massive masterwork, The three Ages of the Interior Life, insisted that contemplation is for all. As we shall soon see, and contrary to expectations, it is the simplest form of prayer.
Yet one of the greatest scandals of the contemporary Church is that there is an ongoing movement, not just to suppress contemplative prayer, but the monasteries, the priories, the convents and the religious houses where this prayer is seen as the ideal. The latest iconoclasts are pseudo intellectuals who think like the Gnostics who preceded them, that the faith is not primarily about love, but about knowledge, their particular brand of ‘religious knowledge’ with which they want to pervert the faith of our Fathers.
David Torkington’s latest book, The Primacy of Loving, the Spirituality of the Heart is now available.