The Christian Contemplative Tradition

In the 3rd and 4th centuries CE, thousands of Christians fled the cities of Egypt, Palestine and Syria for the desert — seeking in solitude and silence the direct experience of God that they felt had been lost as Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. The Desert Fathers and Mothers (Ammas) who emerged from this movement produced the first systematic account of the psychology of contemplative practice — the Philokalia (love of beauty/love of good), compiled in the 18th century from their writings, remains one of the foundational texts of Christian spirituality.

Their central concern was the purification of the nous (the spiritual intellect, the deepest level of human consciousness) from the passions (logismoi — compulsive thoughts and desires) that obscure its natural orientation toward God. The method was a combination of ascetic practice, watchfulness (nepsis) over the movements of the mind, and the repetition of the Jesus Prayer ("Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner") — the seed of the hesychast tradition.

Hesychasm (from the Greek hesychia — stillness, quiet) is the contemplative tradition of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, centred on the practice of the Jesus Prayer and the cultivation of the prayer of the heart — the descent of the mind into the heart and the unceasing repetition of the divine name from that centre.

The hesychast tradition reached its theological summit in the 14th century with Gregory Palamas (1296-1359), who formulated the distinction between God's essence (ousia — absolutely unknowable and transcendent) and God's energies (energeiai — the divine presence that can be genuinely experienced and that transfigures the saint). This distinction — controversial in its time and still debated — made theological space for the genuine experience of union with God without claiming that the mystic becomes God's essence.

The practical vehicle of hesychasm is the Jesus Prayer, repeated continuously with coordinated breathing, gradually descending from the head (where most people experience thought) into the heart (the spiritual centre of the person in Orthodox anthropology). Sustained practice over years produces the state of theosis — deification, the genuine transformation of the human person by participation in the divine energies.

The apophatic (negative) tradition in Christian mysticism — associated with Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (5th-6th century), Meister Eckhart and the anonymous 14th-century English text The Cloud of Unknowing — approaches God through negation rather than affirmation. God cannot be known by any concept, image or idea the mind can form. Every affirmation about God falls short. The only way to approach God is to strip away every concept, every image, every thought — to enter the darkness of unknowing in which God can be encountered in a way that surpasses all understanding.

The Cloud of Unknowing is the most accessible and most practically useful text in this tradition — written for a young contemplative in 14th-century England, it gives concrete guidance on the practice of contemplative prayer. The method: put all thoughts, feelings, memories and concepts under a "cloud of forgetting" below; reach toward God with a simple, naked movement of love above; persist in this reaching through the "cloud of unknowing" that separates the soul from God. The text is only a few pages long and can be read in an afternoon — but it describes a practice that takes a lifetime.

The 20th century saw a remarkable revival of the Christian contemplative tradition — through Thomas Merton (1915-1968), the Trappist monk whose writings on contemplative prayer reached millions; through the development of Centering Prayer by Thomas Keating; through the recovery of the hesychast tradition in the West; and through the growing interest in contemplative practice among Christians who find that the tradition's richest resources have been largely forgotten in mainstream church life.

Thomas Merton's particular contribution was the dialogue between Christian contemplation and Eastern traditions — particularly Zen Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism. His conviction that the contemplative experience at the heart of all traditions points to the same reality, and that the great contemplatives of different traditions recognise each other across all doctrinal differences, has been enormously influential in the contemporary spiritual landscape.