Christian contemplation

What it is

The Christian tradition of prayer that moves beyond words and images toward direct attention to God. It has several distinct strands and one persistent modern misconception — that it does not exist, and that Christians seeking contemplative practice must go east for it.

The main strands:

Hesychasm — the Eastern Orthodox tradition of hesychia, stillness, centred on the Jesus Prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner", repeated continuously, often coordinated with the breath, until it is said to descend from the mind into the heart and continue of itself.

The apophatic way — approaching God by negation, on the grounds that no concept or image is adequate. The via negativa.

The cataphatic way — approaching through image and imagination, as in Ignatian practice, where the practitioner deliberately constructs a Gospel scene and enters it.

Lectio divina — a graded reading practice: lectio (reading), meditatio (reflection), oratio (prayer), contemplatio (resting in God), formalised by Guigo II in the twelfth century.

Where it came from

It begins in the Egyptian desert in the fourth century, with the ascetics later called the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Evagrius Ponticus produced a precise psychology of the thoughts that disturb prayer — his list of eight became, through John Cassian, the seven deadly sins.

Pseudo-Dionysius, writing around 500, gave the apophatic tradition its vocabulary and shaped mystical theology in both East and West for a millennium.

Hesychasm developed on Mount Athos and was defended in the fourteenth century by Gregory Palamas against the philosopher Barlaam, who thought the monks' claim to perceive the uncreated light of God was absurd. Palamas's distinction between God's unknowable essence and God's knowable energies became Orthodox doctrine, and it is one of the more consequential arguments in Christian thought — a formal theological defence of contemplative experience as genuine knowledge.

The Philokalia, an anthology of hesychast texts compiled in 1782, spread the practice widely, and the anonymous nineteenth-century Russian Way of a Pilgrim — a wanderer learning to pray without ceasing — carried it to a popular audience.

In the West: the anonymous fourteenth-century English Cloud of Unknowing, Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Ávila's Interior Castle, and John of the Cross, whose dark night of the soul names the period in which consolation is withdrawn and the practitioner must continue without it.

The modern revival is recent and deliberate. Centering Prayer was developed in the 1970s by Thomas Keating, William Meninger and Basil Pennington at St Joseph's Abbey in Massachusetts — in explicit response to the numbers of Christians taking up Eastern meditation, and drawing on the Cloud of Unknowing for a method their own tradition could offer. Thomas Merton's writing did much to make contemplative practice visible to lay Christians.

How it is practised

The Jesus Prayer: repeated aloud or silently, often with a prayer rope, sometimes with the breath — the first half on the in-breath, the second on the out. Practitioners describe it becoming continuous, running beneath ordinary activity.

Centering Prayer: twenty to thirty minutes, twice daily, with a sacred word used not as a mantra but as a consent — returned to whenever engagement with a thought is noticed.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the tradition is continuous, textually enormous and technically specific, and that the common assumption otherwise is simply wrong. A method of repeating a short phrase in time with the breath, practised for centuries and defended in a formal theological controversy, is not a vague devotional attitude.

We can say the phenomenology overlaps substantially with other traditions — repetition, stillness, the withdrawal of consolation, the dissolution of concepts, an experience of light — while the interpretive frameworks differ sharply. The Orthodox account insists on distinction: the practitioner is united with God's energies, not merged with God's essence. That is a deliberate theological guardrail against exactly the identity claim that Advaita affirms.

That difference is the perennialism argument in miniature, and it cuts against convergence: the traditions that had the experiences drew incompatible conclusions about them, and did so on purpose.

We can say Centering Prayer is modern and is contested within Christianity. Some Orthodox and traditionalist critics argue it imports a technique-based approach foreign to the tradition and risks the errors the Fathers warned about. That dispute is internal and is not this site's to settle.

We cannot say what the hesychasts saw. Palamas argued it was genuinely God; Barlaam argued it was their own imagination; the Church sided with Palamas, and the argument has not been resolved by anything since.

Further reading

• The Philokalia — the hesychast anthology, available in a multi-volume English translation.
• The Cloud of Unknowing (14th c.) — short, and startlingly practical.
• Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (1961).