Contemplation/Contemplative

Contemplation/contemplative is traditionally defined as a specific disposition of attentive receptivity. It causes 'experience' to recede. One can dispose oneself towards attentive receptivity but contemplation is itself gratuitous; its arrival may be gradual or without warning; it is often imperceptible except in retrospect because it elides self-consciousness. The word contemplation entails relinquishing all claims to experience; it opens to what is uncircumscribed and other.

To say 'contemplative text' is nonsensical. In addition, visionary texts do not describe contemplation unless, like Julian's, they move the reader from image to the contemplative event-horizon. The same is true for didactic texts. Devotional texts are not 'contemplative', although they may indirectly foster contemplation if only because the practitioner becomes bored with watching him or her self starring in his or her own religious psycho-drama.

Nor can the word contemplative be used for trance-inducing texts, such as Rolle's canor. Trance is liminal, but self-consciousness is still in control. Abstraction—for example, Thomas à Kempis' Imitation of Christ—is not contemplation; abstraction belongs rather to the realm of self-consciousness, not deep mind. In terms of the Middle English texts with which they are usually grouped, only Julian's Long Text (Sloane) and the Cloud are properly associated with contemplation. To these might be added one contemplative interlocutor: Will, of Piers Plowman.