Comments on and Questions about a Passage in Vohanka’s “Love or Contemplation?”

Vlastimil Vohánka’s  article Love or Contemplation: Hildebrandian and Aristotelian Ways to High Happiness  is surpassingly excellent,  and smooth-sailing for me until I came to the following passage on pp. 10-11 about which I have some questions.

Following Conway and the Aristotelian Josef Pieper, I say that the contemplation of God’s existence and qualities is not to be understood as the process of inquiring whether God exists and what his qualities are.

BV:  I agree. It would be better, though, to refer to Pieper more specifically as a Thomist.  No Aristotle, no Thomas. But there is more to Thomas than Aristotle.  There is a decided Platonic and neo-Platonic strain in Thomas. Ratzinger, the last pope worth his salt, would back me up on this.

Rather, the contemplation is an attentive beholding or seeing that God exists and what God is like. Aristotelians typically depict the contemplation as monologic rather than dialogic, as argumentative rather than intuitive or even non-discursive, and as propositional rather than non-propositional.

BV: The first sentence is fine, but I struggle with the second. What do you mean by ‘monologic’ and ‘dialogic’?  The first from ‘monologue’ and the second from ‘dialogue’?  Admittedly, one cannot have a dialogue with the Prime Mover whereas one presumably can with the personal God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. You seem to be saying that in Aristotle contemplation is a form of argument, and therefore discursive, and not intuitive.  You may be right, but some citation of Aristotelian texts would be helpful. That you are right is suggested by the contrast in Aristotle between the vita contemplativa (bios theoretikos) and the vita activa.  Accordingly, both reasoning about God and directly apprehending God by intellectual intuition (visio intellectualis) — assuming that Aristotle while in a Platonic mood would admit such a thing —  would fall on the side of contemplation.

Suppose some person attentively rehearses, step by step, the soundness of an argument that God exists, which she has seen to be sound many times before. She is contemplating in a typical Aristotelian manner. But, following Pieper, we can understand the contemplation more broadly: as possibly non-argumentative, non-discursive, non-propositional, or non-monologic.  Suppose that the person attends to the putative fact that if God exists then he is omnipresent, and finds it, as she has done before, intuitively self-evident or obvious. Even now she is contemplating. Later she dwells non-discursively (i.e., without elaborate thinking, imagining, remembering, or inner or outer talking) and also without any argumentative or self-evident assurance — but with an assent of faith — on the putative fact that God exists and is omnipresent. She is contemplating, too. Later, she dwells non-discursively on a non-propositional idea of God, or of someone omnipresent. Even so she is contemplating. She is also contemplating when she attentively observes whatever obtains in or outside of her in the present moment (her breath, sensations, feelings, thoughts, outer events or objects) as something caused or enabled by God.

BV:  I am somewhat sympathetic to this broad understanding of ‘contemplation’ which embraces both reasoning, which is discursive, and direct insight/intuition, which is not. Both are epistemic procedures. But faith is not knowledge. So I balk at the notion that an act of faith can be booked under ‘contemplation.’  I would also point out that talk of assent implies assent to a proposition, as opposed to faith in a person. Faith in God is trust in God, and thus non-epistemic.

Later still, she regards herself — attentively and non-discursively — as addressing God from a dialogic, second-person Thou-perspective (although perhaps her message cannot be translated accurately into literal descriptions and can only be described in metaphors or gestures). Or she regards God as addressing her from the same sort of perspective. Or she regards herself and God as aware of each other and also of their mutual awareness. In all these latter cases, the person is praying to God, but contemplating God as well.

BV: If one enters into a person-to-person, I-Thou relation with God, that relation in and of itself is not an act of contemplation, although one could, apart from that relation, also contemplate God.

Suppose my wife and I are sitting in the same room. She is immersed in a book, and I am contemplating her lovingly.  That contemplation is not an I-Thou relation. If I were to initiate an I-Thou relation by addressing her, I would thereby cease to be contemplating her. Contemplation involves a certain objectification which is foreign to the I-Thou relation.  Or so it seems to me.