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01.  Contemplation as Servile to Action

When I pause to lift my myopic gaze above the workaday world, I sense a kind of dis-ease has settled in. I am caught in a quandary. The work I give myself to is part of my created nature, but there is something about it that alienates me from myself, the remedy of which requires something like the ceasing of all activity, a “weekend away” or “retreat.”Further, in a workaday world dominated by technology, Aristotle’s genius, and often overlooked, distinction between natural and human making is instructive. Nature (physis), he says, is internally moved toward certain ends, whereas things we make (techne) are externally moved. Because a lot of what we do for work is not intrinsically motivated it has a way of alienating us from ourselves. I plan to say more about this in a forthcoming article, but for now, it seems to me that this alienation relates to the struggle between our deeper internal orientations and the external orientations or ends (profit, deadlines, products) driving our work. To make the external demands of work servile to our internal orientations will involve a great deal of surrender and loss. This is why insisting on contemplation’s lack of utility, making action servile to contemplation, can be so difficult.

I suspect this is because the culture I inhabit is dominated by work (homo faber). Convinced that the highest mode of being is a life of productivity, I measure myself (and am measured) almost solely by outputs and productivity. In such a culture, contemplation is literally a waste of time. To justify its usefulness, I must imagine prayer as having an observable effect on the world of action. In my attempt to justify prayer’s usefulness, I reduce it to a “pseudo-sabbath,” a kind of weekend that promises to make me more productive, or, to put it more piously, I make prayer a “spiritual weekend” (spiritual disciplines, devotions, and/or retreats) intended to make me a more efficient and productive minister.Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Pieper describes leisure as a kind of contemplation that, in contemporary society, is reduced to a kind of non-action over against what he calls the “workaday” world. He says that in contemporary society we view leisure as opposed to action, whereby leisure is servile to the workaday world. One rests on the weekend or goes on holiday to be more productive during the work. For Pieper, leisure, instead, ought to be the “basis of culture.” It should be ingrained in and guide the workaday world, not be set over against it. In his The Philosophical Act he articulates a metaphysic that sees contemplation and action in mutual harmony to show how the workaday world is servile to contemplation. Pieper’s metaphysic in both works is the foundation for my reflections in this article. In so doing, I unintentionally render contemplation servile to action; a technique or science to be applied to achieve a particular end or outcome.

I am here drawing on Josef Pieper’s logic in The Philosophical Act, wherein he argues that contemplation is meant to “transcend the workaday world.” For Pieper, true contemplation does not serve the immanent workaday world of action and productivity. Because it serves a higher, invisible realm, it is not to “be legitimized by its usefulness or usableness, by virtue of its social function, or with reference to the ‘common need.’”Pieper, The Philosophical Act, 87. By “common need” he means the mere physical needs or goods required by a person and society.

He says that so long as contemplation remains servile to the realm of action it does not “pierce the dome” of the immanent world of action. He notes that while certain forms of contemplation give the appearance of “piercing the dome,” in reality, they serve no higher ends than those of the active world. These false forms of prayer, philosophy, religion, art, poetry, love (and, we might add, self-help) take the form of techniques for manipulating the world and perfecting ourselves.Pieper, 82–84.These “degraded,” “sham,” “spurious,” and “pseudo-realized” forms of contemplation serve the will. Today this technique is perpetuated in the popular repurposing of Stoicism.See, Simone Kotva, Effort and Grace: On the Spiritual Exercise of Philosophy.

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02.  Contemplation Transcends Action

According to Pieper, contemplation that “pierces the dome” of the workaday world sets out with no direct reference to the realm of action. It is, instead, a kind of prayer that begins in the utter surrender of the will, a letting go of all expectations and idols. Exercitants take on an “exclusively” “receptive” posture.Pieper, The Philosophical Act, 90. He likens this contemplative gaze to “wonder,” which he describes as a “purely receptive attitude to reality undisturbed and unsullied by the interjection of the will.”Pieper, The Philosophical Act, 112.He describes wonder in terms of intellectual humility, joy, and hope.Pieper, The Philosophical Act, 118. “Only a spiritual capacity for knowledge that does not know everything it knows at once and perfectly is capable of becoming gradually aware of the deeper and more essential world behind the sensual, physical world—only the human spirit is capable of wonder.” See also, 120–21. It is something like what Simone Kotva calls “passive attention,” a posture that seek to balance effort and grace.Kotva, Effort and Grace. This posture is not unlike that of the Spanish mystics John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, whose exercitants grow more receptive in the later stages of the spiritual life.See, Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle and John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel. See, my suggested practice for using Teresa’s model in The Way of Perfection for praying the “Our Father.”

Michael Casey speaks to the intentions, practice, and uniqueness of this kind of “useless” prayer, our tendency to justify its utility, and the need to resist this impulse,

“ . . . to pray from the heart I need to leave work aside and give myself fully to this something-else-that-seems-like-nothing-at-all . . . I cease production. Overall, my active contribution to the work is lessened because I withdraw some time and energy from it and offer them to God.

But, a generous reader may remark, ‘Such periods of non-engagement in the task add quality to the final product.’ This may be so; one hopes it is true. But making this a reason destroys the value of the gift . . . Time spent in prayer is time lost to temporal gain. It is bread cast onto the waters of eternity.

Contemporary proponents of prayer often recommend it as a useful human activity. They enumerate the fruits of prayer: it will bring inner peace and lower my blood pressure; it will help me to understand God’s plan and reform my chaotic life. One hears it said that if one practiced prayer conscientiously for a few months, problems would begin to disappear. Prayer has fallen into the hands of self-improvers.”Michael Casey, Toward God: The Ancient Wisdom of Western Prayer, 48.

Casey goes on to say that prayer is “consenting to live from a whole different standpoint, displacing self as the cardinal point of life and submitting to be governed by the will of God . . . it is the first stage of surrender.”Casey, 51.

It is the “uselessness” of prayer that makes it transformative, having an indirect, transcendent, bearing upon the active life. That contemplation is transcendent means that it answers to a higher order, an order that works with, perfects, and graces the workaday world. It is not about a gnostic going outside the world of action, but about piercing through it. Prayer is meant to infuse the workaday world with the kinds of “goods” that transcend the visible world of “common needs.” Virtues, the fruit of the spirit, and the transcendentals of beauty, truth, and goodness are all common invisible goods we require for real sustenance, for working and living well together. Such goods are as nourishing to the workaday life as are “common needs.” Made in the divine image, both the realm of action and that of contemplation belong properly to man.Pieper, The Philosophical Act, 93 and 109-11. That “liturgy” (leitourgia) quite literally means “the work of the people” reminds us of the true ends of our prayer and work.

In closing, to be content with contemplation’s “uselessness” in relation to work, is to render the life of action servile to that of contemplation; it is to “hallow” God’s name above all things. As counterintuitive as it seems, when we cease to make contemplation servile to the world of action, our prayer comes to bear upon our work in a transformative way.

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03.  Suggested Reading

Michael Casey, Toward God: The Ancient Wisdom of Western Prayer.

Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture.

Josef Pieper, The Philosophical Act.

Teresa of Avila, The Way of Perfection.

Alexandar Schmemann, For the Life of the World, Appendix I, “Worship in a Secular Age.”

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04.  Suggested Practices

Pray the opening sentences of the “Lord’s Prayer.” In her Way of Perfection, Teresa shows how the “Lord’s Prayer” opens by placing the realm of contemplation over all things. For Teresa, the recitation of “Hallowed be thy name” is an act of recollection whereby the exercitant enters into prayer by surrendering all worldly ambitions and ends in preparation for the coming petition, “thy kingdom come; thy will be done.”

Memorization of Scripture. Casey, in the above-mentioned text (Ch. 9), suggests we memorize short passages or words of scripture to recite verbally or mentally throughout the day as a way of reordering our lives during work.

Memorization of Short Prayers. Casey, similarly, suggests we do the same with short rote prayers, such as the “Jesus Prayer”­ – “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God and Savior, have mercy on me, a sinner,” or Cassian’s suggested prayer opening – “O God come to my assistance; O Lord make haste to help me.”