200. The contemplative life
200. THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE
How can the contemplative life be the highest life, as classical pre-modern philosophers like Aristotle and Aquinas believe, if contemplation is an act of the intellect, while love is an act of the will, and the love of God is the highest thing? Doesn’t Christianity correct that pagan intellectualism?
Gregory says that the contemplative life is to cling with our whole mind to the love of God and our neighbor, and to desire nothing beside our Creator. Now desire and love pertain to the affective or appetitive power. Therefore the contemplative life has also something to do with the affective or appetitive power. . . .
Theirs is said to be the contemplative life who are chiefly intent on the contemplation of truth. Now intention is an act of the will. Consequently, although the contemplative life, as regards the essence of the action (of contemplation), pertains to the intellect, as regards the motive cause of the exercise of that action it belongs to the will, which moves all the other powers, even the intellect. . . . Wherefore Gregory makes the contemplative life to consist in the love of God, inasmuch as through loving God we are aflame to gaze on His beauty.
And since everyone delights when he obtains what he loves, it follows that the contemplative life terminates in delight (II-II,180,1).
The answer to the question is to correct the question: it’s not an either / or. It’s a both / and. The point of the quotation from St. Gregory the Great is that contemplation is a “clinging” as well as a seeing, and thus an act of the will as well as of the mind. Indeed, it is the will that commands the mind. And what is “clung” to is not merely the understanding of God but “the love of God and our neighbor, and to desire (i.e., to will) nothing beside our Creator.”
In the second paragraph St. Thomas points out that the attention which is an act of the intellect is commanded by the will. He then goes farther and says that Gregory not only makes contemplation causally dependent on love, as the act of the will, but also “makes the contemplative life to consist in the love of God.” The “material cause”, in the Aristotelian sense, of the contemplative life is the love of God. It is an intrinsic cause. The causality is not from without but from within; the cause does not stand apart from its effect, as a carpenter stands apart from a house.
When St. Thomas says that “we are aflame to gaze on His beauty” in the contemplative life, he mentions all three powers of the soul, including the emotions, which are indicated by “aflame” and “beauty”. This is made even clearer by the last sentence, which says that the fruition (“termination”) of contemplation is joy (“delight”). So love is (1) the efficient cause, the motive that moves the intellect to contemplate God, (2) the material cause or content of it, what it “consists in”, and (3) the final cause, good, goal, end, or purpose of it. Only the formal cause, the intrinsic essence of it, is intellectual.
The contemplative life is not a withdrawal away from the rest of the life of the soul, especially the will and the emotions, but the fulfillment of all three of its powers. The contemplative withdraws from the world in a way but not from his own humanity; indeed, he withdraws from the world precisely in order to enter more deeply and completely into his own humanity.
This is not a description by a scientist who stands outside his subject but a testimony from a great contemplative saint which is corroborated by his experience and by that of all contemplatives.
If contemplation is the highest of joys, and if it is joy that we always seek, even, and especially, when we sin (for if sin did not seem like joy, we’d all be saints), it follows that the contemplation of God is a powerful weapon against sin because of the joy it yields. As St. Thomas says in II-II, 35,4, “man cannot live without joy; that is why one deprived of spiritual joys goes over to carnal pleasures.” If you doubt that spiritual joys are greater, it is clear which of the two joys you’ve missed. Ask anyone who has tasted both and you will always get the same answer. Try it, you’ll like it.